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HISTOEICAL 

LECTURES AO ESSAYS 



£ 



HISTORICAL 

LECTURES AND ESSAYS 



V 

\3 



BI 

CHARLES KINGSLEY 






LONDON : 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND NEW YORK 

1889 

The right of translation is reserved 



^ 



-0* 



First Edition, 1880. 
Reprinted, 3.885, 1889. 

J/. 4 1^4 



CONTENTS, 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 

(Four Lectures delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh.) 

Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.— Tennyson. 



PREFACE 

LECTURE I. — THE PTOLEMAIC ERA 

„ II. — THE PTOLEMAIC ERA {continued) 

„ III. — NEOPLATONISM . 

IV. — THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT 



PiGE 

3 

14 

40 

69 

103 



THE ANCIEN REGIME. 

(Three Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution.) 

PREFACE 

LECTURE I. — CASTE 

,, II. — CENTRALISATION .... 
III. — THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES . 



135 
148 
172 

202 



vi CONTENTS. 

PAGB 

THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA . . . .237 

CYRUS, SERVANT OF THE LORD 266 

ANCIENT CIVILISATION 289 

RONDELET 313 

VESALIUS 337 

PARACELSUS 361 

BUCHANAN 379 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 



VOL. T. — H. E. 



ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS.* 



PEEFACE. 

I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures 
of mine such a subject as that which I have tried to 
treat in this book. The subject was chosen for me 
by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. 
Still less should I have presumed to print them of my 
own accord, knowing how fragmentary and crude 
they are. They were printed at the special request 
of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to 
have presumed to publish them, as I have done, at 
Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or sciolism (and 
that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but 
fear) would be instantly detected, and severely 
censured : but nevertheless, it seemed to me that 
Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could 
see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe 
what little right method or sound thought may be 
found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have 
ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness 
and ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vast- 
ness and variety of the universe, must needs know 

* These Lectures were delivered at the Philosophical Institution, 
Edinburgh, in February, 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean 
War. 

B 2 



4 ALEXANDEIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. 

everything, or rather know about everything, at 
once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have 
been in past years, to complain of Cambridge studies 
as too dry and narrow : but as time teaches the 
student, year by year, what is really required for an 
understanding of the objects with which he meets, 
he begins to find that his University, in as far as he 
has really received her teaching into himself, has 
given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above 
all, in Plato, something which all the popular know- 
ledge, the lectures and institutions of the da<y, and 
even good books themselves, cannot give, a boon 
more precious than learning ; namely, the art of 
learning. That instead of casting into his lazy lap 
treasures which he would not have known how to 
use, she has taught him to mine for them himself ; 
and has by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual 
greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be 
the stronger to hunt and till for his own subsistence ; 
and thus, the deeper he drinks, in after years, at 
fountains wisely forbidden to him while he was a 
Cambridge student, and sees his old companions 
growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted 
practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a 
firm standing-ground for thought and action, he learns 
to complain less and less of Cambridge studies, and 
more and more of that conceit and haste of his own, 
which kept him from reaping the full advantage of 
her training. 

These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether 
crude and fragmentary — how, indeed, could they be 
otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject, and so long 
a period of time ? They are meant neither as Essays 
nor as Orations, but simply as a collection of hints to 



PREFACE. 5 

those who may wish to work out the subject for 
themselves ; and, I trust, as giving some glimpses of 
a central idea, in the light of which the spiritual 
history of Alexandria, and perhaps of other countries 
also, may be seen to have in itself a coherence and 
organic method. 

I was of course compelled, by the circumstances 
under which these Lectures were delivered, to keep 
clear of all points which are commonly called ' t contro- 
versial." I cannot but feel that this was a gain, 
rather than a loss ; because it forced me, if I wished 
to give any interpretation at all of Alexandrian 
thought, any Theodicy at all of her fate, to refer to 
laws which I cannot but believe to be deeper, wider, 
more truly eternal than the points which cause most 
of cur modern controversies, either theological or 
political; laws which will, I cannot but believe also, 
reassert themselves, and have to be reasserted by all 
wise teachers, very soon indeed, and it may be under 
most novel embodiments, but without any change in 
their eternal spirit. 

For I may say, I hope, now (what if said ten years 
ago would have only excited laughter), that I cannot 
but subscribe to the opinion of the many wise men 
who believe that Europe, and England as an integral 
part thereof, is on the eve of a revolution, spiritual 
and political, as vast and awful as that which took 
place at the Reformation ; and that, beneficial as that 
revolution will doubtless be to the destinies of man- 
kind in general, it depends upon the wisdom and 
courage of each nation individually, whether that 
great deluge shall issue, as the Reformation did, in a 
fresh outgrowth of European nobleness and strength 
or usher in, after pitiable confusions and sorrows, a 



6 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 

second Byzantine age of stereotyped effeminacy and 
imbecility. For I have as little sympathy with those 
who prate so loudly of the progress of the species, and 
the advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal 
peace and plenty, as I have with those who believe on 
the strength of "unfulfilled prophecy," the downfall 
of Christianity, and the end of the human race to be 
at hand. Nevertheless, one may well believe that 
prophecy will be fulfilled in this great crisis, as it is 
in every great crisis, although one be unable to 
conceive by what method of symbolism the drying up 
of the Euphrates can be twisted to signify the fall of 
Constantinople : and one can well believe that a day 
of judgment is at hand, in which for every nation and 
institution, the wheat will be sifted out and gathered 
into God's garner, for the use of future generations, 
and the chaff burnt up with that fire unquenchable 
which will try every man's work, without being of 
opinion that after a few more years are over, the 
great majority of the human race will be consigned 
hopelessly to never-ending torments. 

If prophecy be indeed a divine message to man ; 
if it be anything but a cabbala, useless either to the 
simple-minded or to the logical, intended only for the 
plaything of a few devout fancies, it must declare the 
unchangeable laws by which the unchangeable God 
is governing, and has always governed, the human 
race ; and therefore only by understanding what has 
happened, can we understand what will happen; 
only bj understanding history, can we understand 
prophecy; and that not merely by picking out — too 
often arbitrarily and unfairly — a few names and dates 
from the records of all the ages, but by trying to 
discover its organic laws, and the causes which pro- 



PREFACE. 7 

dace in nations, creeds, and systems, health and 
disease, growth, change, decay and death. If, in one 
small corner of this vast field, I shall have thrown a 
single ray of light upon these subjects — if I shall have 
done anything in these pages towards illustrating the 
pathology of a single people, I shall believe that I have 
done better service to the Catholic Faith and the 
Scriptures, than if I did really " know the times and 
the Reasons, which the Father has kept in His own 
hand." For by the former act I may have helped to 
make some one man more prudent and brave to see 
and to do what Grod requires of him ; by the latter I 
could only add to that paralysis of superstitious fear, 
which is already but too common among us, and but 
too likely to hinder us from doing our duty manfully 
against our real foes, whether it be pestilence at home 
or tyranny abroad. 

These last words lead me to another subject, on 
which I am bound to say a few words. I have, at the 
end of these Lectures, made some allusion to the 
present war. To have entered further into political 
questions would have been improper in the place 
where those Lectures were delivered : but I cannot 
refrain from saying here something more on this 
matter; and that, first, because all political questions 
have their real root in moral and spiritual ones, and 
not (as too many fancy) in questions merely relating 
to the balance of power or commercial economy, and 
are (the world being under the guidance of a spiritual, 
and not a physical Being) finally decided on those 
spiritual grounds, and according to the just laws of 
the kingdom of God; and, therefore, the future 
political horoscope of the East depends entirely on the 
present spiritual state of its inhabitants, and of us 



8 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 

who have (and rightly) taken up their cause ; in short, 
on many of those questions on which I have touched 
in these Lectures : and next, because I feel bound, in 
justice to myself, to guard against any mistake about 
my meaning or supposition that I consider the Turkish 
empire a righteous thing, or one likely to stand much 
longer on the face of God's earth. 

The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me 
an altogether unrighteous and worthless thing. It 
stands no longer upon the assertion of the great truth 
of Islam, but on the merest brute force and oppression. 
It has long since lost the only excuse which one race 
can have for holding another in subjection; that 
which we have for taking on ourselves the tutelage 
of the Hindoos, and which Borne had for its tutelage 
of the Syrians and Egyptians ; namely, the governing 
with tolerable justice those who cannot govern them- 
selves, and making them better and more prosperous 
people, by compelling them to submit to law. I do 
not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God 
showed that it was so for several centuries in the case 
of the Romans; God will show whether it is in the 
case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that the 
Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead ; a« 
is proved by the patent fact that the whole East, the 
very garden of the old world, has become a desert 
and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government. 

As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question 
whether the regeneration of any nation which has 
sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete 
and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is it a 
question whether a regeneration can be effected, not 
by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of 
the Koreish), but simply by more perfect material 



PREFACE. 9 

appliances, and commercial prudence. History gives 
no instance, it seems to me, of either case ; and if our 
attempt to regenerate Greece by freeing it has been 
an utter failure, much more, it seems to me, would any 
such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish race. 
For what can be done with a people which has lost 
the one great quality which was the tenure of its ex- 
istence, its military skill ? Let any one read the 
accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth, 
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when they were 
the tutors and models of all Europe in the art of war, 
and then consider the fact that those very armies 
require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, 
in order to make them capable of even keeping 
together, and let him ask himself seriously, whether 
such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in the age 
of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the 
Roman armies had fallen into the same state ; when 
the Italian legions required to be led by Stilicho the 
Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and 
iSTarses the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, 
and came; as it will come soon to Turkey. 

But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it 
must not fall by our treachery. Its sins will surely 
be avenged upon it : but wrong must not avenge 
wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one 
sinner to another. Whatsoever element of good is 
left in the Turk, to that we must appeal as our only 
means, if not of saving him, still of helping him to a 
quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race 
of successors. He is said (I know not how truly) to 
have one virtue left ; that of faithfulness to his word. 
Only by showing him that we too abhor treachery 
and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a 



10 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 

safe standing-ground in our own peril. And this we 
have done ; and for this we shall be rewarded. But 
this is surely not all our duty. Even if we should be 
able to make the civil and religious freedom of the 
Eastern Christians the price of our assistance to the 
Mussulman, the struggle will not be over ; for Russia 
will still be what she has always been, and the 
northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to 
the contest with fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to 
enact the part of a new Macedon, against a new 
Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond 
of that balance of power, which is but war under the 
guise of peace. Europe needs a holier and more 
spiritual, and therefore a stronger union, than can be 
given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause of 
order. She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan 
age united the free states of Europe against the 
Anarch of Spain, and delivered the Western nations 
from a rising world- tyranny, which promised to be 
even more hideous than the elder one of Rome. If, 
as then, England shall proclaim herself the champion 
of freedom by acts, and not by words and paper, she 
may, as she did then, defy the rulers of the darkness 
of this world, for the God of Light will be with her. 
But, as yet, it is impossible to look without sad fore- 
bodings upon the destiny of a war, begun upon the 
express understanding that evil shall be left trium- 
phant throughout Europe, wheresoever that evil does 
not seem, to our own selfish shortsightedness, to 
threaten us with immediate danger; with promises, 
that under the hollow name of the Cause of Order — 
and that promise made by a revolutionary Anarch — 
the wrongs of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, shall 
remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria, two 



PREFACE. 11 

tyrannies, the one far more false and hypocritical, the 
other even more rotten than that of Turkey, shall, it* 
they will but observe a hollow and uncertain neutrality 
(for who can trust the liar and the oppressor ?) — be 
allowed not only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but 
even now to play into the hands of our foe, by guard- 
ing his Polish frontier for him, and keeping down the 
victims of his cruelty, under pretence of keeping 
down those of their own. 

It is true, the alternative is an awful one ; one 
from which statesmen and nations may well shrink : 
but it is a question, whether that alternative may not 
be forced upon us sooner or later, whether we must 
not from the first look it boldly in the face, as that 
which must be some day, and for which we must 
prepare, not cowardly, and with cries about God's 
wrath and judgments against us : — which would be 
abject, were they not expressed in such second-hand 
stock-phrases as to make one altogether doubt their 
sincerity, but chivalrously, and with awful joy, as a 
noble calling, an honour put upon us by the God of 
Nations, who demands of us, as some small return for 
all His free bounties, that we should be, in this great 
crisis, the champions of Freedom and of Justice, 
which are the cause of God. At all events, we shall 
not escape our duty by being afraid of it ; we shall 
not escape our duty by inventing to ourselves some 
other duty, and calling it C( Order/'' Elizabeth did so 
at first. She tried to keep the peace with Spain ; she 
shrank from injuring the cause of Order (then a 
nobler one than now, because it was the cause of 
Loyalty, and not merely of Mammon) by assisting 
the Scotch and the Netherlander : but her duty was 
forced upon her; and she did it at last, cheerfully, 



12 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. 

boldly, utterly, like a hero; she put herself at the 
head of the battle for the freedom of the world, and 
she conquered, for God was with her; and so that 
seemingly most fearful of all England's perils, when 
the real meaniug of it was seen, and God's will in it 
obeyed manfully, became the foundation of England's 
naval and colonial empire, and laid the foundation of 
all her future glories. So it was then, so it is now ; 
so it will be for ever : he who seeks to save his life 
will lose it : he who willingly throws away his life for 
the cause of mankind, which is the cause of God, 
the Father of mankind, he shall save it, and be 
rewarded a huudred-fold. That God may grant us, 
the children of the Elizabethan heroes, all wisdom 
to see our duty, and courage to do it, even to the 
death, should be our earnest prayer. Our statesmen 
have done wisely and well in refusing, in spite of 
hot-headed clamours, to appeal to the sword as long 
as there was any chance of a peaceful settlement even 
of a single evil. They are doing wisely and well now 
in declining to throw away the scabbard as long as 
there is hope that a determined front will awe the 
offender into submission : but the day may come when 
the scabbard must be thrown away ; and God grant 
that they may have the courage to do it. 

It is reported that our rulers have said, that 
English diplomacy can no longer recognise " nationa- 
lities," but only existing " governments/' God grant 
that they may see in time that the assertion of national 
life, as a spiritual and indefeasible existence, was for 
centuries the central idea of English policy ; the idea 
by faith in which she delivered first herself, and then 
the Protestant nations of the Continent, successively 
from the yokes of Rome, of Spain, of France; and 



PEEFACE. 13 

that they may reassert that most English of all truths 
again, let the apparent cost be what it may. 

It is true, that this end will not be attained 
without what is called nowadays "a destruction of 
human life." But we have yet to learn (at least if the 
doctrines which I have tried to illustrate in this little 
book have any truth in them) whether shot or shell 
has the power of taking away human life ; and to 
believe, if we believe our Bibles, that human life can 
only be destroyed by sin, and that all which is lost in 
battle is that animal life of which it is written, 
" Fear not those who can kill the body, and after that 
have no more that they can do : but I will forewarn 
you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has 
killed, has power to destroy both body and soul in 
hell/" Let a man fear him, the destroying devil, and 
fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness, slug- 
gishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid 
of which is to be truly brave. God grant that we of 
the clergy may remember this during the coming war, 
and instead of weakening the righteous courage and 
honour of our countrymen by instilling into them 
selfish and superstitious fears, and a theory of the 
future state which represents God, not as a saviour, 
but a tormentor, may boldly tell them that " He is 
not the God of the dead but of the living ; for all live 
unto Him ; " and that he who renders up his animal 
life as a worthless thing, in the cause of duty, commits 
his real and human life, his very soul and self, into the 
hands of a just and merciful Father, who has promised 
to leave no good deed unrewarded, and least of all 
that most noble deed, the dying like a man for the 
sake not merely of this land of England, but of the 
freedom and national life of half the world. 



LEOTUKE I. 



THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 



Before I begin to lecture upon the Physical and 
Metaphysical schools of Alexandria, it may be better, 
perhaps, to define the meaning of these two epithets. 
Physical, we shall all agree, means that which belongs 
to <f)vcns ; natura ; nature, that which <f>venu, nascitur, 
grows, by an organic life, and therefore decays again ; 
which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, an 
end. And Metaphysical means that which we learn 
to think of after we think of nature ; that which is 
supernatural, in fact, having neither beginning nor 
end, imperishable, immovable, and eternal, which 
does not become, but always is. These, at least, are 
the wisest definitions of these two terms for us just 
now ; for they are those which were received by the 
whole Alexandrian school, even by those commen- 
tators who say that Aristotle, the inventor of the term 
Metaphysics, named his treatise so only on account 
of its following in philosophic sequence his book on 
Physics. 

But, according to these definitions, the whole 
history of Alexandria might be to us, from one point 
of view, a physical school ; for Alexandria, its society 



lect. i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 15 

and its philosophy, were born, and grew, and fed, and 
reached their vigour, and had their old age, their 
death, even as a plant or an animal has ; and after 
they were dead and dissolved, the atoms of them 
formed food for new creations, entered into new orga- 
nisations, just as the atoms of a dead plant or animal 
might do. Was Alexandria then, from beginning to 
end, merely a natural and physical phenomenon? 

It may have been. And yet we cannot deny that 
Alexandria was also a metaphysical phenomenon, vast 
and deep enough; seeing that it held for some 
eighteen hundred years a population of several 
hundred thousand souls ; each of whom, at least 
according to the Alexandrian philosophy, stood in a 
very intimate relation to those metaphysic things 
which are imperishable and immovable and eternal, 
and indeed, contained them more or less, each man, 
woman, and child of them in themselves ; having 
wills, reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each 
other; being parents, children, helpmates, bound 
together by laws concerning right and wrong, and 
numberless other unseen and spiritual relations. 

Surely such a body was not merely natural, any 
more than any other nation, society, or scientific 
school, made up of men and of the spirits, thoughts, 
affections of men. It, like them, was surely spiritual; 
and could be only living and healthy, in as far as it 
was in harmony with certain spiritual, unseen, and 
everlasting laws of God ; perhaps, as certain Alex- 
andriau philosophers would have held, in as far as it 
was a pattern of that ideal constitution and polity 
after which man was created, the city of God which is 
eternal in the Heavens. If so, may we not suspect of 
this Alexandria that it was its own fault if it became a 



16 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

merely physical phenomenon ; and that it stooped to 
become a part of nature, and took its place among the 
things which are born to die,, only by breaking the 
law which God had appointed for it ; so fulfilling, in 
its own case, St. Paul's great words, that death 
entered into the world by sin, and that sin is the 
transgression of the law ? 

Be that as it may, there must have been meta- 
physic enough to be learnt in that, or any city of 
three hundred thousand inhabitants, even though it had 
never contained lecture-room or philosopher's chair, 
and had never heard the names of Aristotle and Plato. 
Metaphysic enough, indeed, to be learnt there, could 
we but enter into the heart of even the most brutish 
negro slave who ever was brought down the Nile out 
of the desert by Nubian merchants, to build piers and 
docks in whose commerce he did not share, temples 
whose worship he did not comprehend, libraries and 
theatres whose learning and civilisation were to him 
as much a sealed book as they were to his country- 
man, and fellow-slave, and only friend, the ape. 
There was metaphysic enough in him truly, and 
things eternal and immutable, though his dark- 
skinned descendants were three hundred years in dis- 
covering the fact, and in proving it satisfactorily to 
all mankind for ever. You must pardon me if I seem 
obscure ; I cannot help looking at the question with a 
somewhat Alexandrian eye, and talking of the poor 
negro dock-worker as certain Alexandrian philosophers 
would have talked, of whom I shall have to speak 
hereafter. 

I should have been glad, therefore, had time 
permitted me, instead of confining myself strictly to 
what are now called "the physic and metaphysic 



I.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 17 

schools" of Alexandria, to have tried a3 well as I 
could to make you understand how the whole vast 
phenomenon grew up, and supported a peculiar life of 
its own, for fifteen hundred years and more, and was 
felt to be the third, perhaps the second city of the 
known world, and one so important to the great 
world-tyrant, the Caesar of Rome, that no Roman of 
distinction was ever sent there as prefect, but the 
Alexandrian national vanity and pride of race was 
allowed to the last to pet itself by having its tyrant 
chosen from its own people. 

But, though this cannot be, we may find human 
elements enough in the schools of Alexandria, strictly 
so called, to interest us for a few evenings ; for these 
schools were schools of men ; what was discovered 
and taught was discovered and taught by men, and 
not by thinking-machines ; and whether they would 
have been inclined to confess it or not, their own 
personal characters, likes and dislikes, hopes and 
fears, strength and weakness, beliefs and disbeliefs, 
determined their metaphysics and their physics for 
them, quite enough to enable us to feel for them as 
men of like passions with ourselves ; and for that 
reason only, men whose thoughts and speculations are 
worthy of a moment's attention from us. For what is 
really interesting to man, save men, and God, the 
Father of men ? 

In the year 331 B.C. one of the greatest intellects 
whose influence the world has ever felt, saw, with his 
eagle glance, the unrivalled advantage of the spot 
which is now Alexandria ; and conceived the mighty 
project of making it the point of union of two, or 
rather of three worlds. In a new city, named after 
himself, Europe, Asia, and Africa were to meet and to 

vol. I. — h, e, c 



18 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

hold communion. A glance at the map will show you 
what an djiffiakos yrjs, a centre of the world, this 
Alexandria is, and perhaps arouse in your minds, as it 
has often done in mine, the suspicion that it has not 
yet fulfilled its whole destiny, but may become at any 
time a prize for contending nations., or the centre of 
some world-wide empire to come. Communicating 
with Europe and the Levant by the Mediterranean, 
with India by the Red Sea, certain of boundless 
supplies of food from the desert-guarded valley of the 
Nile, to which it formed the only key, thus keeping all 
Egypt, as it were, for its own private farm, it was weak 
only on one side, that of Judea. That small strip of 
fertile mountain land, containing innumerable military 
positions from which an enemy might annoy Egypt, 
being, in fact, one natural chain of fortresses, was the 
key to Phoenicia and Syria. It was an eagle's eyrie 
by the side of a pen of fowls. It must not be left 
defenceless for a single year. Tyre and Gaza had 
been taken; so no danger was to be apprehended 
from the seaboard : but to subdue the Judean moun- 
taineers, a race whose past sufferings had hardened 
them in a dogged fanaticism of courage and endurance, 
would be a long and sanguinary task. It was better 
to make terms with them; to employ them as friendly 
warders of their own mountain walls. Their very 
fanaticism and isolation made them sure allies. There 
was no fear of their fraternising with the Eastern in- 
vaders. If the country was left in their hands, they 
would hold it against all comers. Terms were made 
with them; and for several centuries they fulfilled 
their trust. 

This I apprehend to be the explanation of that 
conciliatory policy of Alexander's toward the Jews, 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 19 

which was pursued steadily by the Ptolemies, by 
Pompey, and by the Romans, as long as these same 
Jews continued to be endurable upon the face of the 
land. At least, we shall find the history of Alexandria 
and that of Judea inextricably united for more than 
three hundred years. 

So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, 
a mighty city, around those two harbours, of which the 
western one only is now in use. The Pharos was then 
an island. It was connected with the mainland by a 
great mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges. On 
the ruins of that mole now stands the greater part of 
the modern city ; the vast site of the ancient one is a 
wilderness. 

But Alexander was not destined to carry out his 
own magnificent project. That was left for the 
general whom he most esteemed, and to whose 
personal prowess he had once owed his life ; a man 
than whom history knows few greater, Ptolemy, the 
son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the son of an 
adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip 
of Macedon. There were those who said that he was 
in reality a son of Philip himself. However, he rose at 
court, became a private friend of young Alexander, 
and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of 
the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, 
till after his great master's death he found himself 
despot of Egypt. 

His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest 
and most Jove-like type of Greek beauty. There is a 
possibility about it, as about most old Greek faces, of 
boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and a con- 
temptuousness, especially about the mouth, which 
puts one in mind of Goethe's expression ; the face, 



20 ALEXANDRIA AND HER, SCHOOLS. [lect. 

altogether, of one who knew men too well to respect 
them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. 
He saw what was needed in those strange times, and 
he went straight to the thing which he saw. It was 
his wisdom which perceived that the huge amorphous 
empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and 
advised its partition among the generals, taking care 
to obtain himself the lion's share ; not in size, indeed, 
but in capability. He saw, too (what every man does 
not see), that the only way to keep what he had got 
was to make it better, and not worse, than he found it. 
His first Egyptian act was to put to death Cleomenes, 
Alexander's lieutenant, who had amassed vast treasures 
by extortion ; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy 
was a prudent man) a dangerous partisan of his great 
enemy, Perdiccas. We do not read that he refunded 
the treasures : but the Egyptians surnamed him Soter, 
the Saviour ; and on the whole he deserved the title. 
Instead of the wretched misrule and slavery of the 
conquering Persian dynasty, they had at least law and 
order, reviving commerce, and a system of administra- 
tion, we are told (I confess to speaking here quite at 
second-hand), especially adapted to the peculiar caste- 
society, and the religious prejudices of Egypt. But 
Ptolemy's political genius went beyond such merely 
material and Warburtonian care for the conservation 
of body and goods of his subjects. He effected with 
complete success a feat which has been attempted, 
before and since, by very many princes and potentates, 
but has always, except in Ptolemy's case, proved some- 
what of a failure, namely, the making a new deity. 
Mythology in general was in a rusty state. The old 
Egyptian gods had grown in his dominions very 
unfashionable, under the summary iconoclasm to 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 21 

which tliey had been subjected by the Monotheist 

Persians — the Puritans of the old world, as they have 

been well called. Indeed, all the dolls, and the 

treasure of the dolls' temples too, had been carried off 

by Canibyses to Babylon. And as for the Greek gods, 

philosophers had sublimed them away sadly during 

the last century : not to mention that Alexander's 

Macedonians, during their wanderings over the world, 

had probably become rather remiss in their religious 

exercises, and had possibly given up mentioning the 

Unseen world, except for those hortatory purposes for 

which it used to be employed by Nelson's veterans. 

But, as Ptolemy felt, people (women especially) must 

have something wherein to believe. The " Religious 

Sentiment " in man must be satisfied. But, how to 

do it ? How to find a deity who would meet the 

aspirations of conquerors as well as conquered — of 

his most irreligious Macedonians, as well as of his 

most religious Egyptians ? It was a great problem : 

but Ptolemy solved it. He seems to have taken the 

same method which Brindley the engineer used in his 

perplexities, for he went to bed. And there he had 

a dream : How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus 

(somewhere near this present hapless Sinope), appeared 

to him, and expressed his wish to come to Alexandria, 

and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment. 

So Serapis was sent for, and came — at least the idol of 

him, and — accommodating personage ! — he actually 

fitted. After he had been there awhile, he was found 

to be quite an old acquaintance — to be, in fact, the 

Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also 

two or three Egyptian gods beside — indeed, to be no other 

than the bull Apis, after his death and deification. I 

can tell you no more. I never could find that anything 



22 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

more was known. You may see hirn among Greek and 
Roman statues as a young man, with, a sort of high 
basket-shaped Persian turban on his head. But, at 
least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating a 
conscience-keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly- 
found mother, or wife, over the whole East, and even 
to Rome. The Consuls there — 50 years B.C. — found the 
pair not too respectable, and pulled down their temples. 
But, so popular were they, in spite of their bad fame, 
that seven years after, the Triumvirs had to build the 
temples up again elsewhere ; and from that time forth, 
Isis and Serapis, in spite, poor things, of much perse- 
cution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman world. 
Surely this Ptolemy was a man of genius ! 

But Ptolemy had even more important work to do 
than making gods. He had to make men ; for he had 
few or none ready made among his old veterans from 
Issus and Arbela. He had no hereditary aristocracy : 
and he wanted none. No aristocracy of wealth ; that 
might grow of itself, only too fast for his despotic 
power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of men 
round him who would do his work. And here came 
out his deep insight into fact. It had not escaped that 
man, what was the secret of Greek supremacy. How 
had he come there ? How had his great master 
conquered half the world ? How had the little semi- 
barbarous mountain tribe up there in Pella, risen 
under Philip to be the master-race of the globe? 
How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, 
how had the handfuls of Salamis and Marathon, held 
out triumphantly century after century, against the 
vast weight of the barbarian ? The simple answer 
was : Because the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere 
brute force. Because mind is the lord of matter : 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 25 

because the Greek being the cultivated man, is the 
only true man ; the rest are (Sdppapoi, mere things, clods, 
tools for the wise Greeks' use, in spite of all their 
material phantom-strength of elephants, and treasures, 
and tributaries by the million. Mind was the secret 
of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would work. 
He would have an aristocracy of intellect ; he would 
gather round him the wise men of the world (glad 
enough most of them to leave that miserable Greece, 
where every man's life was in his hand from hour to 
hour), and he would develop to its highest the 
conception of Philip, when he made Aristotle the 
tutor of his son Alexander. The consequences of that 
attempt were written in letters of blood, over half the 
world ; Ptolemy would attempt it once more, with 
gentler results. For though he fought long, and 
often, and well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as 
general of Alexander, he was not at heart a man of 
blood, and made peace the end of all his wars. 

So he begins. Aristotle is gone : but in Aristotle's 
place Philetas the sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus 
the grammarian of Ephesus, shall educate his favourite 
son, and he will have a literary court, and a literary age. 
Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his 
time, the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, 
poet, warrior, and each of them in the most graceful, 
insinuating, courtly way, migrates to Alexandria, after 
having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which 
the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, 
as hastily pulled down again. Here was a prize for 
Ptolemy ! The charming man became his bosom friend 
and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and 
fired him, if report says true, with a mighty thought 
— no less a one than the great public Library of 



24 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

Alexandria ; the first such, institution, it is said, which 
the world had ever seen. 

So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and 
completed by Philadelphus ; or rather two libraries, 
for while one part was kept at the Serapeium, that 
vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which, as 
far as we can discover, Pompey's Pillar alone remains* 
one column out of four hundred, the rest was in the 
Brucheion adjoining the Palace and the Museum. 
Philadelphus buys Aristotle's collection to add to the 
stock, and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the 
original MSS. of iEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, 
and adds largely to it by more honest methods. 
Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with 
emulation, commences a similar collection, and is so 
successful, that the reigning Ptolemy has to cut off his 
rival's supplies by prohibiting the exportation of 
papyrus ; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth 
transcribed on parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, 
which thus has its name to this day, from Pergamus. 
That collection, too, found its way at last to Alexandria. 
For Antony having become possessor of it by right of 
the stronger, gave it to Cleopatra ; and it remained at 
Alexandria for seven hundred years. But we must 
not anticipate events. 

Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple 
of the Muses, with all due appliances, in a vast building 
adjoining the palace itself, under the very wing of 
royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages 
may converse ; lecture-rooms, where they may display 
themselves at their will to their rapt scholars, each 
like a turkey-cock before his brood ; and a large 
dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in 



I.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 25 

moderation, as befits sages, not without puns and 
repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and Attic salt, to be 
fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For 
Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced, him by 
some quibbling puzzle of logic, Ptolemy surnamed 
him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went home, 
took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful 
nothing, and died in despair, leaving five " dialectical 
daughters " behind him, to be thorns in the sides of 
some five hapless men of Macedonia, as " emancipated 
women ; " a class but too common in the later days of 
Greece, as they will always be, perhaps, in civilisations 
which are decaying and crumbling to pieces, leaving 
their members to seek in bewilderment what they are, 
and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. 
But to return : funds shall be provided for the 
Museum from the treasury ; a priest of rank, appointed 
by royalty, shall be curator ; botanical and zoological 
gardens shall be attached ; collections of wonders 
made. In all things the presiding genius of Aristotle 
shall be worshipped ; for these, like Alexander, were 
his pupils. Had he not mapped out all heaven and 
earth, things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, 
and energies, and dunameis, and put every created and 
uncreated thing henceforth into its proper place, from 
the ascidians and polypes of the sea to the virtues and 
the vices — yea, to that Great Deity and Prime Cause 
(which indeed was all things), Noesis Noeseon, "the 
Thought of Thoughts/' whom he discovered by 
irrefragable processes of logic, and in whom the 
philosophers believe privately, leaving Serapis to the 
women and the sailors ? All they had to do was to 
follow in his steps ; to take each of them a branch, 
of science or literature, or as many branches as one 



28 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. Oct. 

man conveniently can ; and working them out on the 
approved methods, end in a few years, as Alexander 
did, by weeping on the utmost shore of creation that 
there are no more worlds left to conquer. 

Alas ! the Muses are shy and wild ; and though 
they will haunt, like skylarks, on the bleakest northern 
moor as cheerfully as on the sunny hills of Greece, and 
rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet 
they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however 
amusingly made and plentifully stored with comforts- 
Royal societies, associations of savants, and the like, 
are good for many things, but not for the breeding of 
art and genius : for they are things which cannot be 
bred. Such institutions are excellent for physical 
science, when, as among us now, physical science is 
going on the right method : but where, as in 
Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, 
they stereotype the errors of the age, and invest them 
with the prestige of authority, and produce mere 
Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants. To literature, too, 
they do some good, that is, in a literary age — an age 
of reflection rather than of production, of antiquarian 
research, criticism, imitation, when book-making has 
become an easy and respectable pursuit for the many 
who cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg. And yet, by 
adding that same prestige of authority, not to mention 
of good society and Court favour, to the popular 
mania for literature, they help on the growing evil, 
and increase the multitude of prophets who prophesy 
out of their own heart and have seen nothing. 

And this was, it must be said, the outcome of all 
the Ptolem93an appliances. 

In Physics they did little. In Art nothing. In 
Metaphysics less than nothing. 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 27 

We will first examine, as the more pleasant spectacle 
of the two, that branch of thought in which some 
progress was really made, and in which the Ptolemaic 
schools helped forward the development of men who 
have become world-famous, and will remain so, I 
suppose, until the end of time. 

Four names at once attract us : Euclid, Aristarchus, 
Eratosthenes, Hipparchus. Archimedes, also, should 
be included in the list, for he was a pupil of the 
Alexandrian school, having studied (if Proclus is to be 
trusted) in Egypt, under Conon the Samian, during 
the reigns of two Ptolemies, Philadelphus andEuergetes. 

Of Euclid, as the founder (according to Proclus) 
of the Alexandrian Mathematical school, I must of 
course speak first. Those who wish to attain to a 
juster conception of the man and his work than they 
can do from any other source, will do well to read 
Professor De Morgan's admirable article on him in 
" Smith's Classical Dictionary;" which includes, also, a 
valuable little sketch of the rise of Geometric science, 
from Pythagoras and Plato, of whose school Euclid 
was, to the great master himself. 

I shall confine myself to one observation on 
Euclid's genius, and on the immense influence which 
it exerted on after generations. It seems to me, 
speaking under correction, that it exerted this, 
because it was so complete a type of the general 
tendency of the Greek mind, deductive, rather 
than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining 
results from principles, and results again from 
them ad infinitum: deficient in that sturdy moral 
patience which is required for the examination of facts, 
and which has made Britain at once a land of practical 
craftsmen, and of earnest scientific discoverers. 



28 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

Volatile, restless, "always children longing for 
something new/' as the Egyptian priest said of them, 
they were too ready to believe that they had attained 
laws, and then, tired with their toy, throw away 
those hastily assumed laws, and wander off in 
search of others. Gifted, beyond all the sons of men, 
with the most exquisite perception of form, both 
physical and metaphysical, they could become 
geometers and logicians as they became sculptors 
and artists ; beyond that they could hardly rise. 
They were conscious of their power to build ; and it 
made them ashamed to dig. 

Four men only among them seem, as far as I can 
judge, to have had a great inductive power: Socrates 
and Plato in Metaphysics; Archimedes and Hipparchus 
in Physics. But these men ran so far counter to the 
national genius, that their examples were not followed. 
As you will hear presently, the discoveries of Archi- 
medes and Hipparchus were allowed to remain where 
they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato and 
Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making 
anything appear alternately true and false, and among 
the Megaric school, for undermining the ground of all 
science, and paving the way for scepticism, by deny- 
ing the natural world to be the object of certain know- 
ledge. The only element of Plato's thought to which 
they clung was, as we shall find from the Neoplato- 
nists, his physical speculations ; in which, deserting 
his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into 
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive 
dreams about the mysterious powers of numbers, and 
of the regular solids. 

Such a people, when they took to studying physical 
science, would be, and in fact were, incapable of 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 29 

Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy, or any 
of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now 
building up the material as well as the intellectual glory 
of Britain. 

To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of 
Euclid turned naturally, as to the science which required 
the greatest amount of their favourite geometry : but 
even that they were content to let pass from its 
inductive to its deductive stage — not as we have done 
now, after two centuries of inductive search for the 
true laws, and their final discovery by Kepler and 
Newton : but as soon as Hipparchus had propounded 
any theory which would do instead of the true laws, 
content there to stop their experiments, and return to 
their favourite work of commenting, deducing, spinning 
notion out of notion, ad infinitum. 

Still, they were not all of this temper. Had 
they been, they would have discovered, not merely 
a little, but absolutely nothing. For after all, if 
we will consider, induction being the right path to 
knowledge, every man, whether he knows it or not, 
uses induction, more or less, by the mere fact of his 
having a human reason, and knowing anything at all ; 
as M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without being 
aware of it. 

Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to 
discover the distance of the sun as compared with that 
of the moon. His method was ingenious enough, but 
too rough for success, as it depended principally on 
the belief that the line bounding the bright part of 
the moon was an exact straight line. The result was 
of course erroneous. He concluded that the sun was 
18 times as far as the moon, and not, as we now know, 
400; but his conclusion, like his conception of the 



30 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

vast extent of the sphere of the fixed stars, was far 
enough in advance of the popular doctrine to subject 
him, according to Plutarch, to a charge of impiety. 

Eratosthenes, again, contributed his mite to the 
treasure of human science — his one mite ; and yet by 
that he is better known than by all the volumes which 
he seems to have poured out, on Ethics, Chronology, 
Criticism on the Old Attic Comedy, and what not, spun 
out of his weary brain during a long life of research 
and meditation. They have all perished, — like ninety- 
nine hundredths of the labours of that great literary 
age ; and perhaps the world is no poorer for the loss. 
But one thing, which he attempted on a sound and 
practical philosophic method, stands, and will stand 
for ever. And after all, is not that enough to have 
lived for? to have found out one true thing, and, 
therefore, one imperishable thing, in one's life ? If 
each one of us could but say when he died : " This one 
thing I have found out ; this one thing I have proved 
to be possible ; this one eternal fact I have rescued 
from Hela, the realm of the formless and unknown," 
how rich one such generation might make the world 
for ever ! 

But such is not the appointed method. The finders 
are few and far between, because the true seekers are 
few and far between ; and a whole generation has often 
nothing to show for its existence but one solitary gem 
which some one man — often unnoticed in his time — 
has picked up for them, and so given them " a local 
habitation and a name." 

Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper 
Egypt, deep wells were enlightened to the bottom on 
the day of the summer solstice, and that vertical objects 
cast no shadows. 



I.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 31 

He had before suggested, as is supposed, to 
Ptolemy Euergetes, to make him the two great copper 
arrnillge, or circles for determining the equinox, which 
stood for centuries in " that which is called the Square 
Porch" — probably somewhere in the Museum. By 
these he had calculated the obliquity of the ecliptic, 
closely enough to serve for a thousand years after. 
That was one work done. But what had the Syene 
shadows to do with that ? Syene must be under that 
ecliptic. On the edge of it. In short, just under the 
tropic. Now he had ascertained exactly the latitude 
of one place on the earth's surface. He had his known 
point from whence to start on a world-journey, and he 
would use it ; he would calculate the circumference of 
the earth — and he did it. By observations made at 
Alexandria, he ascertained its latitude compared with 
that of Syene ; and so ascertained what proportion to 
the whole circumference was borne by the 5000 stadia 
between Alexandria and Syene. He fell into an error, 
by supposing Alexandria and Syene to be under the 
same meridians of longitude : but that did not prevent 
his arriving at a fair rough result of 252,000 stadia — 
31,500 Roman miles ; considerably too much ; but 
still, before him, I suppose, none knew whether it was 
10,000, or 10,000,000. The right method having once 
been found, nothing remained but to employ it more 
accurately. 

One other great merit of Eratosthenes is, that he 
first raised Geography to the rank of a science. His 
Geographica were an organic collection, the first the 
world had ever seen, of all the travels and books of 
earth-description heaped together in the Great Library, 
of which he was for many years the keeper. He began 
with a geognostic book, touched on the traces of 



32 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

Cataclysms and Change visible on the earth's surface ; 
followed by two books, one a mathematical book, the 
other on political geography, and completed by a map 

— which one would like to see : but not a trace of 

all remains, save a few quoted fragments — ■ 

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of. 

But if Eratosthenes had hold of eternal fact and law 
on one point, there was a contemporary who had hold of 
it in more than one. I mean Archimedes ; of whom, 
as I have said, we must speak as of an Alexandrian. 
It was as a mechanician, rather than as an astronomer, 
that he gained his reputation. The stories of his 
Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship which he built for 
Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane, 
his war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical 
arrangement of mirrors, by which he set fire to ships 
in the harbour — all these, like the story of his detecting 
the alloy in Hiero's crown, while he himself was in the 
bath, and running home undressed shouting evprjKa — 
all these are schoolboys' tales. To the thoughtful 
person it is the method of the man which constitutes 
his real greatness, that power of insight by which he 
solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever 
and of hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all 
static and hydrostatic science to this day. And yet 
on that very question of the lever the great mind 
of Aristotle babbles — neither sees the thing itself, nor 
the way towards seeing it. But since Archimedes 
spoke, the thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. 
There is something to me very solemn in such a fact 
as this. It brings us down to some of the very deepest 
questions of metaphysic. This mental insight of which 



l.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 33 

we boast so much, what is it ? Is it altogether a process 
of our own brain and will ? If it be, why have so few the 
power, even among men of power, and they so seldom ? 
If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not 
Aristotle have discovered ? Or is it that no man can 
see a thing unless God shows it him ? Is it that in 
each separate act of induction, that mysterious and 
transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try 
as they will, be expressed by any merely logical 
formula, Aristotelian or other — is it, I say, that in 
each separate act of induction we do not find the law, 
but the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law ? 
Bacon thought so. Of that you may find clear proof 
in his writings. May not Bacon be right ? May it 
not be true that God does in science, as well as in 
ethics, hide things from the wise and prudent, from 
the proud, complete, self-contained systematiser like 
Aristotle, who must needs explain all things in heaven 
and earth by his own formulas, and his entelechies and 
energies, and the rest of the notions which he has 
made for himself out of his .own brain, and then pack 
each thing away in its proper niche in his great cloud- 
universe of conceptions ? Is it that God hides things 
from such men many a time, and reveals them to babes, 
to gentle, affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we 
know Archimedes to have been, who do not try to give 
an explanation for a fact, but feel how awful and 
divine it is, and wrestle reverently and stedfastly with 
it, as Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it go, 
until it bless them ? Sure I am, from what I have 
seen of scientific men, that there is an intimate con- 
nection between the health of the moral faculties 
and the health of the inductive ones ; and that the 
proud, self-conceited, and passionate man will see 

VOL. I. — H. K. D 



34 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

nothing: perhaps because nothing will be shown 
him. 

But we must leave Archimedes for a man not per- 
haps so well known, but to whom we owe as much as 
to the great Syracusan — Hipparchus the astronomer. 
To his case much which I have just said applies. In 
him astronomic science seemed to awaken suddenly to 
a true inductive method, and after him to fall into its 
old slumber for 300 years. In the meantime Timo- 
charis, Aristyllus, and Conon had each added their 
mites to the discoveries of Eratosthenes : but to 
Hipparchus we owe that theory of the heavens, 
commonly called the Ptolemaic system, which, starting 
from the assumption that the earth was the centre of 
the universe, attempted to explain the motions of the 
heavenly bodies by a complex system of supposed 
eccentrics and epicycles. This has of course now 
vanished before modern discoveries. But its value as 
a scientific attempt lies in this : that the method being 
a correct one, correct results were obtained, though 
starting from a false assumption ; and Hipparchus and 
his successors were enabled by it to calculate and 
predict the changes of the heavens, in spite of their 
clumsy instruments, with almost as much accuracy as 
we do now. 

For the purpose of working out this theory he re- 
quired a science of trigonometry, plane and spherical : 
and this he accordingly seems to have invented. To 
him also we owe the discovery of that vast gradual 
change in the position of the fixed stars, in fact, of the 
whole celestial system, now known by the name of the 
precession of the equinoxes ; the first great catalogue 
of fixed stars, to the number of 1080; attempts to 
ascertain whether the length of years and days were 



i.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 35 

constant ; with which, with his characteristic love of 
truth, he seems to have been hardly satisfied. He too 
invented the planisphere, or mode of representing the 
starry heavens upon a plane, and is the father of true 
geography, having formed the happy notion of map- 
ping out the earth, as well as the heavens, by degrees 
of latitude and longitude. 

Strange it is, and somewhat sad, that we should 
know nothing of this great man, should be hardly able 
to distinguish him from others of the same name, but 
through the works of a commentator, who wrote and 
observed in Alexandria 300 years after, during the 
age of the Antonines. I mean, of course, the famous 
Ptolemy, whose name so long bore the honour of that 
system which really belonged to Hipparchus. 

This single fact speaks volumes for the real weak- 
ness of the great artificial school of literature and 
science founded by the kings of Egypt. From the 
father of Astronomy, as Delambre calls him, to 
Ptolemy, the first man who seems really to have 
appreciated him, we have not a discovery, hardly an 
observation or a name, to fill the gap. Physical sages 
there were ; but they were geometers and mathema- 
ticians, rather than astronomic observers and inquirers. 
And in spite of all the huge appliances and advantages 
of that great Museum, its inhabitants were content, in 
physical science, as in all other branches of thought, 
to comment, to expound, to do everything but open 
their eyes and observe facts, and learn from them, as 
the predecessors whom they pretended to honour had 
done. But so it is always. A genius, an original man 
appears. He puts himself boldly in contact with facts, 
asks them what they mean, and writes down their 
answer for the world's use. And then his disciples 

d 2 



36 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

must needs form a school, and a system ; and fancy 
that they do honour to their master by refusing to 
follow in his steps ; by making his book a fixed dog- 
matic canon; attaching to it some magical infalli- 
bility ; declaring the very lie which he disproved by 
his whole existence, that discovery is henceforth im- 
possible, and the sum of knowledge complete : instead 
of going on to discover as he discovered before them, 
and by following his method, show that they honour 
him, not in the letter, but in spirit and in truth. 

For this, if you will consider, is the true meaning 
of that great command, " Honour thy father and 
mother, that thy days may be long in the land." On 
reverence for the authority of bygone generations 
depends the permanence of every form of thought or 
belief, as much as of all social, national, and family 
life : but on reverence of the spirit, not merely of the 
letter ; of the methods of our ancestors, not merely of 
their conclusions. Ay, and we shall not be able to 
preserve their conclusions, not even to understand 
them ; they will die away on our lips into skeleton 
notions, and soulless phrases, unless we see that the 
greatness of the mighty dead has always consisted in 
this, that they were seekers, improvers, inventors, 
endued with that divine power and right of discovery 
which has been bestowed on us, even as on them \ 
unless we become such men as they were, and go on to 
cultivate and develop the precious heritage which they 
have bequeathed to us, instead of hiding their talent 
in a napkin and burying it in the earth; making 
their greatness an excuse for our own littleness, their 
industry for our laziness, their faith for our despair ; 
and prating about the old paths, while we forget 
that paths were made that men might walk in 



r.j THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 37 

them, and not stand still, and try in vain to stop the 
way. 

It may be said, certainly, as an excuse for these 
Alexandrian Greeks, that they were a people in a 
state of old age and decay; and that they only ex- 
hibited the common and natural faults of old age. 
For as with individuals, so with races, nations, 
societies, schools of thought — youth is the time of 
free fancy and poetry ; manhood of calm and strong 
induction; old age of deduction, when men settle 
down upon their lees, and content themselves with re- 
affirming and verifying the conclusions of their earlier 
years, and too often, alas ! with denying and anathe- 
matising all conclusions which have been arrived at 
since their own meridian. It is sad : but it is patent 
and common. It is sad to think that the day may 
come to each of us, when we shall have ceased to hope 
for discovery and for progress ; when a thing will 
seem a priori false to us, simply because it is new; 
and we shall be saying querulously to the Divine 
Light which lightens every man who comes into the 
world : ' ' Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. 
Thou hast taught men enough ; yea rather, thou hast 
exhausted thine own infinitude, and hast no more to 
teach them." Surely such a temper is to be fought 
against, prayed against, both in ourselves, and in the 
generation in which we live. Surely there is no 
reason why such a temper should overtake old age. 
There may be reason enough, " in the nature of 
things/' For that which is of nature is born only to 
decay and die. But in man there is more than dying 
nature ; there is spirit, and a capability of spiritual 
and everlasting life, which renews its youth like the 
eagle's, and goes on from strength to strength, and 



38 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

which,, if it have its autumns and its winters, has no 
less its ever-recurring springs and summers ; if it has 
its Sabbaths, finds in them only rest and refreshment 
for coming labour. And why not in nations, societies, 
scientific schools ? These too are not merely natural : 
they are spiritual, and are only living and healthy in 
as far as they are in harmony with spiritual, unseen, 
and everlasting laws of God. May not they, too, have 
a capability of everlasting life, as long as they obey 
those laws in faith, and patience, and humility ? We 
cannot deny the analogy between the individual man 
and these societies of men. We cannot, at least, deny 
the analogy between them in growth, decay, and 
death. May we not have hope that it holds good also 
for that which can never die ; and that if they do die, 
as this old Greek society did, it is by no brute natural 
necessity, but by their own unfaithfulness to that 
which they knew, to that which they ought to have 
known ? It is always more hopeful, always, as I 
think, more philosophic, to throw the blame of failure 
on man, on our own selves, rather than on God, and 
the perfect law of His universe. At least let us be 
sure for ourselves, that such an old age as befell 
this Greek society, as befalls many a man nowadays, 
need not be our lot. Let us be sure that earth shows 
no fairer sight than the old man, whose worn-out 
brain and nerves make it painful, and perhaps 
impossible, to produce fresh thought himself : but 
who can yet welcome smilingly and joyfully the 
fresh thoughts of others ; who keeps unwearied his 
faith in God's government of the universe, in God's 
continual education of the human race; who draws 
around him the young and the sanguine, not merely 
to check their rashness by his wise cautions, but to 



i.J THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 39 

inspirit their sloth by the memories of his own past 
victories ; who hands over, without envy or repining, 
the lamp of truth to younger runners than himself, 
and sits contented by, bidding the new generation God 
speed along the paths untrodden by him, but seen afar 
off by faith. A few such old persons have I seen, both 
men and women ; in whom the young heart beat pure 
and fresh, beneath the cautious and practised brain of 
age, and gray hairs which were indeed a crown of glory. 
A few such have I seen ; and from them I seemed to 
learn what was the likeness of our Father who is in 
heaven. To such an old age may He bring you and 
me, and all for whom we are bound to pray. 



LECTURE II. 

THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 

(Continued.) 

I said in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be 
profitable for the prosecution of physical science, it 
cannot be profitable for art. It can only produce a 
literary age, as it did in the Ptolemaic era ; a generation 
of innumerable court-poets, artificial epigrammatists, 
artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists and epicists ; 
above all, a generation of critics. Or rather shall we 
say, that the dynasty was not the cause of a literary 
age, but only its correlative ? That when the old 
Greeks lost the power of being free, of being anything 
but the slaves of oriental despots, as the Ptolemies in 
reality were, they lost also the power of producing true 
works of art ; because thoy had lost that youthful 
vigour of mind from which both art and freedom 
sprang ? Let the case be as it will, Alexandrian 
literature need not detain us long — though, alas ! it 
has detained every boy who ever trembled over his 
Greek grammar, for many a weary year ; and, I cannot 
help suspecting, has been the main cause that so many 
young men who have spent seven years in learning 



lect. il] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 41 

Greek, know nothing about it at the end of the seven. 
For I must say, that as far as we can see, these 
Alexandrian pedants were thorough pedants ; very 
polished and learned gentlemen, no doubt, and, like 
Callimachus, the pets of princes : but after all, men 
who thought that they could make up for not writing 
great works themselves, by showing*, with careful 
analysis and commentation, how men used to write 
them of old, or rather how they fancied men used 
to write them ; for, consider, if they had really known 
how the thing was done, they must needs have been able 
to do it themselves. Thus Callimachus, the favourite of 
Ptolemy Philadelphus, and librarian of his Museum, is 
the most distinguished grammariau, critic, and poet of 
his day, and has for pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius 
Khodius, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and a goodly list 
more. He is an encyclopaedia in himself. There is 
nothing the man does not know, or probably, if we 
spoke more correctly, nothing he does not know about. 
He writes on history, on the Museum, on barbarous 
names, on the wonders of the world, on public games, 
on colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the 
world, and — ominous subject — a sort of comprehensive 
history of Greek literature, with a careful classification 
of all authors, each under his own heading. Greek 
literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be 
sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing 
about it. But still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, 
moreover, a poet. He writes an epic, i( Aitia," in four 
books, on the causes of the myths, religious ceremonies, 
and so forth — an ominous sign for the myths also, and 
the belief in them ; also a Hecate, Galatasa, Glaucus — - 
four epics, besides comedies, tragedies, iambics, chori- 
ainbics, elegies, hymns, epigrams seventy-three — and of 



42 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

these last alone can we say that they are in any degree 
readable ; and they are courtly, far-fetched, neat, and 
that is all. Six hymns remain, and a few fragments of 
the elegies : but the most famous elegy, on Berenice's 
hair, is preserved to us only in a Latin paraphrase of 
Catullus. It is curious, as the earliest instance we 
have of genuinely ungenuine Court poetry, and of 
the complimentary lie which does not even pretend 
to be true ; the flattery which will not take the trouble 
to prevent your seeing that it is laughing in your 
face. 

Berenice the queen, on Ptolemy's departure to the 
wars, vows her beautiful tresses to her favourite god- 
dess, as the price of her husband's safe return; and 
duly pays her vow. The hair is hung up in the temple : 
in a day or two after it has vanished. Dire is the 
wrath of Ptolemy, the consternation of the priests,, 
the scandal to religion ; when Conon, the court - 
astronomer, luckily searching the heavens, finds the 
missing tresses in an utterly unexpected place — as a 
new constellation of stars, which to this day bears th& 
title of Coma Berenices. It is so convenient to believe 
the fact, that everybody believes it accordingly ; and 
Callimachus writes an elegy thereon, in which the 
constellified, or indeed deified tresses, address in most 
melodious and highly-finished Greek, bedizened with 
concetto on concetto, that fair and sacred head whereon 
they grew, to be shorn from which is so dire a sorrow, 
that apotheosis itself can hardly reconcile them to the 
parting. 

Worthy, was not all this, of the descendants of the 
men who fought at Marathon and Thermopylae ? The 
old Greek civilisation was rotting swiftly down ; while 
a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in that 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 43 

unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined 
to burn up that dead world, and all its works. 

Callrmachus's hymns, those may read who list. 
They are highly finished enough; the work of a man 
who knew thoroughly what sort of article he intended 
to make, and what were the most approved methods of 
making it. Curious and cumbrous mythological lore 
comes out in every other line. The smartness, the fine 
epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of effect, are 
beyond all praise; but as for one spark of life, of 
poetry, of real belief, you will find none ; not even in 
that famous Lavacrum Palladis which Angelo Poliziano 
thought worth translating into Latin elegiacs, about 
the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio 
Maria Salviano, found Berenice's Hair worthy to be 
paraphrased back from Catullus' Latin into Greek, to 
give the world some faint notion of the inestimable 
and incomparable original. They must have had much 
time on their hands. But at the Revival of Letters, 
as was to be expected, all works of the ancients, good 
and bad, were devoured alike with youthful eagerness 
by the Medicis and the Popes; and it was not, we 
shall see, for more than one century after, that men's 
taste got sufficiently matured to distinguish between 
Callimachus and the Homeric hymns, or between Plato 
and Proems. Yet Callimachus and his fellows had an 
effect on the world. His writings, as well as those of 
Philetas, were the model on which Ovid, Propertius, 
Tibullus, formed themselves. 

And so I leave him, with two hints. If any one 
wishes to see the justice of my censure, let him read 
one of the Alexandrian hymns, and immediately after 
it, one of those glorious old Homeric hymns to the 
very same deities ; let him contrast the insincere and 



44 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

fulsome idolatry of Callimachus with the reverent, 
simple and manful anthropomorphism of the Homerist 
— and let him form his own judgment. 

The other hint is this. If Callimachus, the founder 
of Alexandrian literature, be such as he is, what are 
his pupils likely to become, at least without some 
infusion of healthier blood, such as in the case of his 
Roman imitators produced a new and not altogether 
ignoble school ? 

Of Lycophron, the fellow-grammarian and poet of 
Callimachus, we have nothing left but the Cassandra, 
a long iambic poem, stuffed with traditionary learning, 
and so obscure, that it obtained for him the surname 
of o-Koreivos, the dark one. I have tried in vain to read 
it : you, if you will, may do the same. 

Philetas, the remaining member of the Alexandrian 
Triad, seems to have been a more simple, genial, and 
graceful spirit than the other two, to whom he was 
accordingly esteemed inferior. Only a few fragments 
are left; but he was not altogether without his in- 
fluence, for he was, as I have just said, one of the models 
on which Propertius and Ovid formed themselves ; and 
some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy, 
with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form 
of thought, and, therefore, in a great degree, of our 
modern eighteenth century poets ; not a useless excel- 
lence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him 
who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to 
be able to make his readers see it clearly also. And 
yet one natural strain is heard amid all this artificial 
jingle — that of Theocritus. It is not altogether 
Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the 
chestnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and 
sunny pastures of Sicily; but the intercourse between 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 45 

the courts of Hiero and the Ptolemies seems to have 
been continual. Poets and philosophers moved freely 
from one to the other, and found a like atmosphere in 
both; and in one of Theocritus' idyls, two Sicilian 
gentlemen, crossed in love, agree to sail for Alexandria, 
and volunteer into the army of the great and good 
king Ptolemy, of whom a sketch is given worth read- 
ing; as a man noble, generous, and stately, "know- 
ing well who loves him, and still better who love3 
him not." He has another encomium on Ptolemy, 
more laboured, though not less interesting : but the 
real value of Theocritus lies in his power of landscape- 
painting. 

One can well conceive the delight which his idyls 
must have given to those dusty Alexandrians, pent up 
forever between sea and sand-hills, drinking the tank- 
water, and never hearing the sound of a running stream 
— whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and intrigue 
of a great commercial and literary city. Refreshing 
indeed it must have been to them to hear of those 
simple joys and simple sorrows of the Sicilian shepherd, 
in a land where toil was but exercise, and mere existence 
was enjoyment. To them, and to us also. I believe 
Theocritus is one of the poets who will never die. He 
sees men and things, in his own light way, truly ; and 
he describes them simply, honestly, with little careless 
touches of pathos and humour, while he floods his 
whole scene with that gorgeous Sicilian air, like one 
of Titian's pictures; with still sunshine, whispering 
pines, the lizard sleeping on the wall, and the sun- 
burnt cicala shrieking on the spray, the pears and 
apples dropping from the orchard bough, the goats 
clambering from crag to crag after the cistus and the 
thyme, the brown youths and wanton lasses singing 



46 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lecT. 

under the dark chestnut boughs, or by the leafy arch 
of some 

Grot nymph-haunted, 
Garlanded over with vine, and acanthus, and clambering roses, 
Cool in the fierce still noon, where the streams glance clear in 
the moss-beds; 

and here and there, beyond the braes and meads, blue 
glimpses of the far-off summer sea ; and all this told 
in a language and a metre which shapes itself almost 
unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most luscions 
song. Doubt not that many a soul then, was the 
simpler, and purer, and better, for reading the sweet 
singer of Syracuse. He has his immoralities ; but 
they are the immoralities of his age : his naturalness, 
his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own. 

And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those 
grammarians to whose corrections we owe, I suppose, 
the texts of the Greek poets as they now stand. They 
seem to have set to work at their task methodically 
enough, under the direction of their most literary 
monarch, Ptolemy Philadelphus. Alexander the 
iEfcolian collected and revised the tragedies, Lycophron 
the comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the 
other poets of the Epic cycle, now lost to us. Whether 
Homer prospered under all his expungings, alterations, 
and transpositions — whether, in fact, he did not treat 
Homer very much as Bentley wanted to treat Milton, is 
a suspicion which one has a right to entertain, though 
it is long past the possibility of proof. Let that be 
as it may, the critical business grew and prospered. 
Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries and gram- 
mars, collected editions of Plato and Aristotle, aesthetic 
disquisitions on Homer — one wishes they were pre- 
served, for the sake of the jest, that one might have 



il] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 47 

seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of Achilles and 
Ulysses ! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for 
ns moderns, he invented Greek accents ; thereby, I fear, 
so complicating and confusing our notions of Greek 
rhythm, that we shall never, to the end of time, be able 
to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric 
Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the 
pedants, according to their wont, began quarrelling 
about their accents and their recensions. Moreover, 
there was a rival school at Pergamus where the fame 
of Crates all but equalled the Egyptian fame of 
Aristarchus. Insolent ! What right had an Asiatic 
to know anything ? So Aristarchus flew furiously on 
Crates, being a man of plain common sense, who felt a 
correct reading a far more important thing than any of 
Crates's illustrations, sesthetic, historical, or mytholo- 
gical ; a preference not yet quite extinct, in one, at 
least, of our Universities. " Sir/' said a clever Cam- 
bridge Tutor to a philosophically inclined freshman, 
" remember, that our business is to translate Plato 
correctly, not to discover his meaning." And, para- 
doxical as it may seem, he was right. Let us first have 
accuracy, the merest mechanical accuracy, in every 
branch of knowledge. Let us know what the thing 
is which we are looking at. Let us know the exact 
words an author uses. Let us get at the exact value 
of each word by that severe induction of which 
Buttmann and the great Germans have set such noble 
examples ; and then, and not till then, we may begin 
to talk about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. 
Very probably Aristarchus was right in his dislike of 
Crates's preference of what he called criticism, to 
grammar. Very probably he connected it with the 
other object of his especial hatred, that fashion of 



48 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

interpreting Homer allegorically, which was spring- 
ing up in his time, and which afterwards under the 
Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height, and helped to 
destroy in them, not only their power of sound judg- 
ment, and of asking each thing patiently what it was, 
but also any real reverence for, or understanding of, 
the very authors over whom they declaimed and 
sentimentalised. 

Yes — the Cambridge Tutor was right. Before you 
can tell what a man means, you must have patience 
to find out what he says. So far from wishing our 
grammatical and philological education to be less 
severe than it is, I think it is not severe enough. In 
an age like this — an age of lectures, and of popular 
literature, and of self-culture, too often random and 
capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful 
in asking ourselves, in compelling others to ask them- 
selves, the meaning of every word which they use, of 
every word which they read; in assuring them, whether 
they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as 
the intellectual culture, acquired by translating accu- 
rately one dialogue of Plato, by making out thoroughly 
the sense of one chapter of a standard author, is 
greater than they will get from skimming whole folios 
of Schlegelian aesthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, 
and the like second-hand information, or attending 
seven lectures a- week till their lives' end. It is tetter 
to know one thing, than to know about ten thousand 
things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after reading 
those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller 
Ossoli, that the especial danger of this time is 
intellectual sciolism, vagueness, sentimental eclecti- 
cism — and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed, 
that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however 



H.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 49 

glib, and grand, and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably 
the parent of a moral vagueness and shallowness, which 
may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without 
an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to 
escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists 
did, by plunging desperately into any fetish- worship- 
ping superstition which holds out to its wearied and 
yet impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already 
made for it, of objects of admiration already formed 
and systematised. 

Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his 
place ; and, among others, these old grammarians of 
Alexandria ; only being sure that as soon as any man 
begins, as they did, displaying himself peacock-fashion, 
boasting of his science as the great pursuit of humanity, 
and insulting his fellow- crafts men, he becomes, ipso 
facto, unable to discover any more truth for us, having 
put on a habit of mind to which induction is impossible; 
and is thenceforth to be passed by with a kindly but 
a pitying smile. And so, indeed, it happened with 
these quarrelsome Alexandrian grammarians, as it did 
with the Casaubons and Scaligers and Daciers of the 
last two centuries. As soon as they began quarrelling 
they lost the power of discovering. The want of the 
inductive faculty in their attempts at philology is 
utterly ludicrous. Most of their derivations of words 
are about on a par with Jacob Bohmen's etymology of 
sulphur, wherein he makes sul } if I recollect right, 
signify some active principle of combustion, and phur 
the passive one. It was left for more patient and less 
noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to found 
a science of philology, to discover for us those great 
laws which connect modern philology with history, 
ethnology, physiology, and with the very deepest 
vol. i. — H. E. E 



50 ALEXANDRIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. Elect. 

questions of theology itself. And in the meanwhile, 
these Alexandrians' worthless criticism has been utterly- 
swept away; while their real work, their accurate editions 
of the classics, remain to us as a precious heritage. So 
it is throughout history : nothing dies which is worthy to 
live. The wheat is surely gathered into the garner, 
the chaff is burnt up by that eternal fire which, 
happily for this universe, cannot be quenched by any 
art of man, but goes on forever, devouring without 
indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the 
world. 

As yet you have heard nothing of the metaphysical 
schools of Alexandria ; for as yet none have existed, in 
the modern acceptation of that word. Indeed, I am 
not sure that I must not tell you frankly, that none 
ever existed at all in Alexandria, in that same modern 
acceptation. Batter, I think, it is who complains 
naively enough, that the Alexandrian Neoplatonists had 
a bad habit, which grew on them more and more as 
the years rolled on, of mixing up philosophy with 
theology, and so defiling, or at all events colouring, 
its pure transparency. There is no denying the impu- 
tation, as I shall show at greater length in my next 
Lecture. But one would have thought, looking back 
through history, that the Alexandrians were not the 
only philosophers guilty of this shameful act of syn- 
cretism. Plato, one would have thought, was as great 
a sinner as they. So were the Hindoos. In spite of 
all their logical and metaphysical acuteness, they 
were, you will find, unable to get rid of the notion 
that theological inquiries concerning Brahma, Atma, 
Creeshna, were indissolubly mixed up with that same 
logic and metaphysic. The Parsees could not separate 
questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from Kant's 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 51 

three great philosophic problems : What is Man ? — 
What may be known ? — What should be done ? 
Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek sages. Not 
one of them, of any school whatsoever — from the 
semi-mythic Seven Sages to Plato and Aristotle — but 
finds it necessary to consider not in passing, but as 
the great object of research, questions concerning the 
gods: — whether they are real or not ;■ one or many; 
personal or impersonal; cosmic, and parts of the 
universe, or organisers and rulers of it ; in relation to 
man, or without relation to him. Even in those who 
flatly deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius 
himself, these questions have to be considered, before 
the question, What is man ? can get any solution at 
all. On the answer given to them is found to depend 
intimately the answer to the question, What is the 
immaterial part of man ? Is it a part of nature, or of 
something above nature ? Has he an immaterial part 
at all ? — in one word, Is a human metaphysic possible 
at all ? So it was with the Greek philosophers of old, 
even, as Asclepius and Ammonius say, with Aristotle 
himself. " The object of Aristotle's metaphysic, " 
one of them says, " is theological. Herein Aristotle 
theologises." And there is no denying the assertion. 
We must not then be hard on the Neoplatonists, as if 
they were the first to mix things separate from the 
foundation of the world. I do not say that theology 
and metaphysic are separate studies. That is to be 
ascertained only by seeing some one separate them. 
And when I see them separated, I shall believe them 
separable. Only the separation must not be produced 
by the simple expedient of denying the existence of 
either one of them, or at least of ignoring the existence 
of one steadily during the study of the other. If they 

£ 2 



52 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. |> CT - 

can be parted without injury to eacli other, let them 
be parted ; and till then let us suspend hard judgments 
on the Alexandrian school of metaphysic, and also on 
the schools of that curious people the Jews, who had 
at this period a steadily increasing influence on the 
thought, as well as on the commercial prosperity, of 
Alexandria. 

You must not suppose, in the meanwhile, that the 
philosophers whom the Ptolemies collected (as they 
would have any other marketable article) by liberal 
offers of pay and patronage, were such men as the old 
Seven Sages of Greece, or as Socrates, Plato, and 
Aristotle. In these three last indeed, Greek thought 
reached not merely its greatest height, but the edge 
of a precipice, down which it rolled headlong after 
their decease. The intellectual defects of the Greek 
mind, of which I have already spoken, were doubtless 
one great cause of this decay : but, to my mind, 
moral causes had still more to do with it. The more 
cultivated Greek states, to judge from the writings of 
Plato, had not been an over-righteous people during 
the generation in which he lived. And in the 
generations which followed, they became an altogether 
wicked people ; immoral, unbelieving, hating good, 
and delighting in all which was evil. And it was in 
consequence of these very sins of theirs, as I think, 
that the old Hellenic race began to die out physically, 
and population throughout Greece to. decrease with 
frightful rapidity, after the time of the Achaean league. 
The facts are well known ; and foul enough they are. 
When the Romans destroyed Greece, God was just 
and merciful. The eagles were gathered together 
only because the carrion needed to be removed from 
the face of God's earth. And at the time of which I 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 53 

now speak, the signs of approaching death were fear- 
fully apparent. Hapless and hopeless enough were 
the clique of men out of whom the first two Ptolemies 
hoped to form a school of philosophy ; men certainly 
clever enough, and amusing withal, who might give 
the kings of Egypt many a shrewd lesson in king-craft, 
and the ways of this world, and the art of profiting by 
the folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish ; or 
who might amuse them, in default of fighting-cocks, 
by puns and repartees, and battles of logic ; " how one 
thing cannot be predicated of another/'' or " how the 
wise man is not only to overcome every misfortune, 
but not even to feel it/' and other such mighty 
questions, which in those days hid that deep unbelief 
in any truth whatsoever which was spreading fast 
over the minds of men. Such word-splitters were 
Stilpo and Diodorus, the slayer and the slain. They 
were of the Megaran school, and were named Dialectics ; 
and also, with more truth, Eristics, or quarrellers. 
Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Socrates 
in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions 
and conclusions, in preaching an absolute and eternal 
Being. But there was this deep gulf between them 
and Socrates ; that while Socrates professed to be 
seeking for the Absolute and Eternal, for that which 
is, they were content with affirming that it exists. 
With him, as with the older sages, philosophy was a 
search for truth. With them it was a scheme of 
doctrines to be defended. And the dialectic on which 
they prided themselves so much, differed from his 
accordingly. He nsed it inductively, to seek out, 
under the notions and conceptions of the mind, certain 
absolute truths and laws of which they were only the 
embodiment. Words and thought were to him a field 



51 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

for careful and reverent induction, as the phenomena 
of nature are to us the disciples of Bacon. But with 
these hapless Megarans, who thought that they had 
found that for which Socrates professed only to seek 
dimly and afar off, and had got it safe in a dogma, pre- 
served as it were in spirits, and put by in a museum, the 
great use of dialectic was to confute opponents. Delight 
in their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of 
objective truth, but of the forms of the intellect where- 
by it may be demonstrated ; till they became the 
veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom 
their master had attacked, and justified too often 
Aristophanes' calumny, which confounded Socrates 
with his opponents, as a man whose aim was to make 
the worse appear the better reason. 

We have here, in both parties, all the marks of 
an age of exhaustion, of scepticism, of despair about 
finding any real truth. ISTo wonder that they were 
superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, 
and by the Academy, which prided itself on setting up 
each thing to knock it down again ; and so by prudent 
and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of every assertion, 
neither affirming too much, nor denying too much, 
keep their minds in a wholesome — or unwholesome — 
state of equilibrium, as stagnant pools are kept, that 
everything may have free toleration to rot undisturbed. 

These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of 
Plato, and the logic of Aristotle, careless of any vital 
principles or real results, ready enough to use fallacies 
each for their own party, and openly proud of their 
success in doing so, were assisted by worthy com- 
peers of an outwardly opposite tone of thought, the 
Oyrenaics, Theodorus and Hegesias. With their clique, 
as with their master Aristippus, the senses were the 



„.] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 55 

only avenues to knowledge ; man was the measure of 
all things; and "happiness our being's end and aim.'" 
Theodoras was surnamed the Atheist ; and, it seems, 
not without good reason ; for he taught that there was 
no absolute or eternal difference between good and 
evil ; nothing really disgraceful in crimes ; no divine 
ground for laws, which according to him had been 
invented by men to prevent fools from making them- 
selves disagreeable ; on which theory, laws must be 
confessed to have been in all ages somewhat of a 
failure. He seems to have been, like his master, an 
impudent light-hearted fellow, who took life easily 
enough, laughed at patriotism, and all other high-flown 
notions, boasted that the world was his country, and 
was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the 
great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man 
of a darker and more melancholic temperament ; and 
while Theodoras contented himself with preaching a 
comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made 
it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their 
theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they 
were in France during the analogous period, the Siecle 
Louis Quinze. The " Oontrat Social/'' and the rest of 
their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will always 
have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety 
of the human species exists for whose especial behoof 
Theodoras held that laws were made ; and the whole 
form of thought met with great approbation in after 
years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest 
perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train 
of rather severe lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in 
his " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire/'' little or 
nothing was heard of it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at 
the Papal courts of the sixteenth century. To revive 



56 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

it publicly, or at least as much of it as could be borne 
by a world now for seventeen centuries Christian, was 
the glory of the eighteenth century. The moral scheme 
of Theodorus has now nearly vanished among us, at 
least as a confessed creed ; and, in spite of the authority 
of Mr. Locke's great and good name, his metaphysical 
scheme is showing signs of a like approaching dis- 
appearance. Let us hope that it may be a speedy one ; 
for if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge ; if 
man be the measure of all things ; and if law have not, 
as Hooker says, her fount and home in the very bosom 
of Glod himself, then was Homer's Zeus right in 
declaring man to be " the most wretched of all the 
beasts of the field/*' 

And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe 
(I dare not call it respect) at that melancholic faithless 
Hegesias. Doubtless he, like his compeers, and indeed 
all Alexandria for three hundred years, cultivated 
philosophy with no more real purpose than it was 
cultivated by the graceless beaux- esprit s of Louis XV/s 
court, and with as little practical effect on morality ; 
but of this Hegesias alone it stands written, that his 
teaching actually made men do something ; and more- 
over, do the most solemn and important thing which 
any man can do, excepting always doing right. I 
must confess, however, that the result of his teaching 
took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy, 
apparently Philaderphus, had to interfere with the 
sacred right of every man to talk as much nonsense as 
he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach at Alexandria. 
For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather 
more morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, 
having discovered that the great end of man was to 
avoid pain, also discovered (his digestion being probably 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 57 

in a disordered state) that there was so much more 
pain than pleasure in the world, as to make it a 
thoroughly disagreeable place, of which man was well 
rid at any price. Whereon he wrote a book called 
'KiroKaprepav, in which a man who had determined to 
starve himself, preached the miseries of human life, 
and the blessings of death, with such overpowering 
force, that the book actually drove many persons to 
commit suicide, and escape from a world which was 
not fit to dwell in. A fearful proof of how rotten the 
state of society was becoming, how desperate the 
minds of men, during those frightful centuries which 
immediately preceded the Christian era, and how fast 
was approaching that dark chaos of unbelief and 
unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so analyses and 
describes in the first chapter of his Epistle to the 
Romans — when the old light was lost, the old faiths 
extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family and 
national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts 
themselves perverted ; that chaos whose darkness 
Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus have proved, in 
their fearful pages, not to have been exaggerated by 
the more compassionate though more righteous Jew. 

And now observe, that this selfishness — this whole- 
some state of equilibrium — this philosophic calm, which 
is really only a lazy pride, was, as far as we can tell, 
the main object of all the schools from the time of 
Alexander to the Christian era. We know very little 
of those Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, 
Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom there has been so much 
talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans, 
from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and 
not ignoble life. But this we do know of the later 
sects, that they gradually gave up the search for truth, 



58 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

and propounded to themselves as the great type for a 
philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from 
this evil world ? They may have been right ; it may 
have been the best thing to think about in those ex- 
hausted and decaying times : but it was a question of 
ethics, not of philosophy, in the sense which the old 
Greek sages put on that latter word. Their object 
was, not to get at the laws of all things, but to fortify 
themselves against all things, each according to his 
scheme, and so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even 
in the Stoics, who boldly and righteously asserted an 
immutable morality, this was the leading conception. 
As has been well said of them : 

" If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse 
between men and a divine race superior to themselves 
had worked itself into the Greek character — what a 
number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had 
impregnated and procured credence for — how it sus- 
tained every form of polity and every system of laws, 
we may imagine what the effects must have been of 
its disappearance. If it is possible for any man, it was 
not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself con- 
nected by any real bonds with his fellow- creatures 
around him, while he felt himself utterly separated from 
any being above his fellow- creatures. But the sense 
of that isolation would affect different minds very 
differently. It drove the Epicurean to t consider' how 
he might make a world in which he should live comfort- 
ably, without distracting visions of the past and future, 
and the dread of those upper powers who no longer 
awakened in him any feelings of sympathy. It drove 
Zeno the Stoic to consider whether a man may not 
find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what is 
beyond him be ever so unfriendly. . . , We may trace 



it.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 59 

in the productions which are attributed to Zeno a very 
clear indication of the feeling which was at work in his 
mind. He undertook, for instance, among other tasks, 
to answer Plato's ' Republic/ The truth that a man 
is a political being, which informs and pervades that 
book, was one which must have been particularly 
harassing to his mind, and which he felt must be got 
rid of, before he could hope to assert his doctrine of a 
man's solitary dignity/' 

Woe to the nation or the society in which this 
individualising and separating process is going on in 
the human mind ! Whether it take the form of a 
religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and 
the cause of senility, decay, and death. If man begins 
to forget that he is a social being, a member of a body, 
and that the only truths which can avail him anything, 
the only truths which are worthy objects of his 
philosophical search, are those which are equally true 
for every man, which will equally avail every man, 
which he must proclaim, as far as he can, to every 
man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, 
he enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the 
dissolution of that society of which he is a member. 
I care little whether what he holds be true or not. If 
it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it 
proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding 
others from it. He has darkened his own power of 
vision by that act of self -appropriation, so that even 
if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly, dis- 
coloured by the medium of his own private likes and 
dislikes, and fulfils that great and truly philosophic 
law, that he who loveth not his brother is in darkness, 
and knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it befell 
those old Greek schools. It is out of our path to follow 



60 ALEXANDBIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. [lect. 

them to Italy, where sturdy old Roman patriots cursed 
theni, and with good reason, as corrupting the morals 
of the young. Our business is with Alexandria ; and 
there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation 
of humanity. What culture they may have given, pro- 
bably helped to make the Alexandrians, what Caesar calls 
them, the most ingenious of all nations : but righteous 
or valiant men it did not make them. When, after 
the three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and 
Euergetes, the race of the Ptolemies began to wear 
itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its sovereigns 
fell ; and daring a miserable and shameful decline of 
a hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants 
fought over accents and readings with the true odium 
grammaticum, and kings plunged deeper and deeper 
into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and 
cruelty, till the flood came, and swept them all away. 
Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt, betrayed her country 
to the Roman; and thenceforth the Alexandrians 
became slaves in all but name. 

And now that Alexandria has become a tributary 
province, is it to share the usual lot of enslaved countries 
and lose all originality and vigour of thought ? Not so. 
From this point, strangely enough, it begins to have a 
philosophy of its own. Hitherto it has been importing 
Greek thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the 
furthest boundaries of Persia ; and the whole East has 
become Greek : but it has received little in return. 
The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or 
no effect on Greek philosophy, except in the case of 
Pyrrho : the Persian Dualism still less. The Egyptian 
symbolic nature-worship had been too gross to be 
regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as anything 
but a barbaric superstition. One eastern nation had 



il] THE PTOLEMAIC EEA. 61 

intermingled closely with the Macedonian race, and 
from it Alexandrian thought received a new impulse. 

I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory 
policy which the Ptolemies had pursued toward the 
Jews. Soter had not only allowed but encouraged 
them to settle in Alexandria and Egypt, granting them 
the same political privileges with the Macedonians 
and other Greeks. Soon they built themselves a 
temple there, in obedience to some supposed prophecy 
in their sacred writings, which seems most probably 
to have been a wilful interpolation. Whatsoever value 
we may attach to the various myths concerning the 
translation of their Scriptures into Greek, there can 
be no doubt that they were translated in the reign of 
Soter, and that the exceedingly valuable Septuagint 
version is the work of that period. Moreover, their 
numbers in Alexandria were very great. When 
Amrou took Constantinople in a.d. 640, there were 
40,000 Jews in it ; and their numbers during the 
Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their temporary 
expulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater ; 
and Egypt altogether is said to have contained 200,000 
Jews. They had schools there, which were so esteemed 
by their whole nation throughout the East, that the 
Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were 
called, may be fairly considered as the centre of Jewish 
thought and learning for several centuries. 

We are accustomed, and not without reason, to 
think with some contempt of these old Rabbis. Rab- 
binism, Cabbalism, are become by-words in the months 
of men. It may be instructive for us — it is certainly 
necessary for us, if we wish to understand Alexandria — ■ 
to examine a little how they became so fallen. 

Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, 



62 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

on certain ancient books of their people; histories, 
laws, poems, philosophical treatises, which all have one 
element peculiar to themselves, namely, the assertion 
of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, not merely of 
the Jewish race, but of all the nations of the earth. 
After the return of their race from Babylon, their own 
records give abundant evidence that this strange people 
became the most exclusive and sectarian which the 
world ever saw. Into the causes of that exclusiveness 
I will not now enter ; suffice it to say, that it was par- 
donable enough in a people asserting Monotheism in 
the midst of idolatrous nations, and who knew, from 
experience even more bitter than that which taught 
Plato and Socrates, how directly all those popular 
idolatries led to every form of baseness and immorality. 
But we may trace in them, from the date of their 
return from Babylon, especially from their settlement 
in Alexandria, a singular change of opinion. In pro- 
portion as they began to deny that their unseen 
personal Euler had anything to do with the Gentiles — 
the nations of the earth, as they called them — in pro- 
portion as they considered themselves as His only 
subjects — or rather, Him and His guidance as their 
own private property — exactly in that proportion they 
began to lose all living or practical belief that He did 
guide them. He became a being of the past; one 
who had taught and governed their forefathers in old 
times : not one who was teaching and governing them 
now. I beg you to pay attention to this curious result ; 
because you will see, I think, the very same thing 
occurring in two other Alexandrian schools, of which 
I shall speak hereafter. 

The result to these Rabbis was, that the inspired 
books which spoke of this Divine guidance and 



il] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 63 

government became objects of superstitious reverence, 
just in proportion as they lost all understanding of 
their real value and meaning. Nevertheless, this too 
produced good results ; for the greatest possible care 
was taken to fix the Canon of these books ; to settle, 
as far as possible, the exact time at which the Divine 
guidance was supposed to have ceased ; after which it 
was impious to claim a Divine teaching; when their 
sages were left to themselves, as they fancied, with a 
complete body of knowledge, on which they were 
henceforth only to comment. Thus, whether or not 
they were right in supposing that the Divine Teacher 
had ceased to teach and inspire them, they did infinite 
service by marking out for us certain writers whom 
He had certainly taught and inspired. No doubt they 
were right in their sense of the awful change which 
had passed over their nation. There was an infinite 
difference between them and the old Hebrew writers. 
They had lost something which those old prophets pos- 
sessed, I invite you to ponder, each for himself, on 
the causes of this strange loss; bearing in mind that 
they lost their forefathers' heirloom, exactly in pro- 
portion as they began to believe it to be their exclusive 
possession, and to deny other human beings any right 
to or share in it. It may have been that the light 
given to their forefathers had, as they thought, really 
departed. It may have been, also, that the light was 
there all around them still, as bright as ever, but that 
they would not open their eyes and behold it ; or rather, 
could not open them, because selfishness and pride 
had sealed them. It may have been, that inspiration 
was still very near them too, if their spirits had been 
willing to receive it. But of the fact of the change 
there was no doubt. For the old Hebrew seers were 



64 ALEXANDEIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. [lect. 

men dealing with the loftiest and deepest laws : the 
Rabbis were shallow pedants. The old Hebrew seers 
were righteous and virtuous men : the Rabbis became, 
in due time, some of the worst and wickedest men 
who ever trod this earth. 

Thus they too had their share in that downward 
career of pedantry which we have seen characterise the 
whole past Alexandrine age. They, like Zenodotus 
and Aristarchus, were commentators, grammarians, 
sectarian disputers : they were not thinkers or actors. 
Their inspired books were to them no more the words 
of living human beings who had sought for the Absolute 
Wisdom, and found it after many sins and doubts and 
sorrows. The human writers became in their eyes the 
puppets and mouthpieces of some magical influence, 
not the disciples of a living and loving person. The 
book itself was, in their belief, not in any true sense 
inspired, but magically dictated — by what power they 
cared not to define. His character was unimportant to 
them, provided He had inspired no nation but their 
own. But, thought they, if the words were dictated, 
each of them must have some mysterious value. And 
if each word had a mysterious value, why not each 
letter ? And how could they set limits to that mys- 
terious value ? Might not these words, even rearrange- 
ments of the letters of them, be useful in protecting 
them against the sorceries of the heathen, in driving 
away those evil spirits, or evoking those good spirits, 
who, though seldom mentioned in their early records, 
had after their return from Babylon begun to form an 
important part of their unseen world ? For as they had 
lost faith in the One Preserver of their race, they had 
filled up the void by a ponderous demonology of 
innumerable preservers. This process of thought was 



ii.] THE PTOLEMAIC ERA. 65 

not confined to Alexandria. Dr. Layard, in his last 
book on Nineveh, gives some curious instances of its 
prevalence among them at an earlier period, well worth 
your careful study. But it was at Alexandria that the 
Jewish Cabbalism formed itself into a system. It was 
there that the Jews learnt to become the jugglers and 
magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till Claudius 
had to expel them from Rome, as pests to rational and 
moral society. 

And yet, among these hapless pedants there 
lingered nobler thoughts and hopes. They could not 
read the glorious heirlooms of their race without 
finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, 
of old deliverances worked for their forefathers ; and 
what seemed promises, too, that that greatness should 
return. The notion that those promises were con- 
ditional; that they expressed eternal moral laws, and 
declared the consequences of obeying those laws, they 
had lost long ago. By looking on themselves as 
exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by Heaven, they 
were ruining their own moral sense. Things were not 
right or wrong to them because Right was eternal and 
divine, and Wrong the transgression of that eternal 
right. How could that be? For then the right things 
the Gentiles seemed to do would be right and divine ; 
— and that supposition in their eyes was all but 
impious. None could do right but themselves, for they 
only knew the law of God. So, right with them had 
no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in 
their minds to the performance of certain acts com- 
manded exclusively to them — a form of ethics which 
rapidly sank. into the most petty and frivolous casuistry 
as to the outward performance of those acts. The 
sequel of those ethics is known to all the world., in the 

vol, i. — H. E, j 



06 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and 
scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter 
absence of moral sense, in their most cultivated and 
learned men, than the world has ever beheld before or 
since. 

In such a state of mind it was impossible for them 
to look on their old prophets as true seers, beholding 
and applying eternal moral laws, and, therefore, seeing 
the future in the present and in the past. They must 
be the mere utterers of an irreversible arbitrary fate ; 
and that fate must, of course, be favourable to their 
nation. So now arose a school who picked out from 
their old prophets every passage which could be made 
to predict their future glory, and a science which 
settled when that glory was to return. By the 
arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic day was defined 
to mean a year; a week, seven years. The most simple 
and human utterances were found to have recondite 
meanings relative to their future triumph over 
the heathens whom they cursed and hated. If any 
of you ever come across the popular Jewish inter- 
pretations of The Song of Solomon, you will there see 
the folly in which acute and learned men can indulge 
themselves when they have lost hold of the belief in 
anything really absolute and eternal and moral, and 
have made Fate, and Time, and Self, their real deities. 
But this dream of a future restoration was in no wise 
ennobled, as far as we can see, with any desire for a 
moral restoration. They believed that a person would 
appear some day or other to deliver them. Even they 
were happily preserved by their sacred books from the 
notion that deliverance was to be found for them, or 
for any man, in an abstraction or notion ending in 
-ation or -ality. In justice to them it must be said, 



II.] THE PTOLEMAIC EKA. 67 

tliat they were too wise to believe that personal 
qualities, such as power, will, love, righteousness, could 
reside in any but in a person, or be manifested except 
by a person. And among the earlier of them the belief 
may have been, that the ancient unseen Teacher of 
their race would be their deliverer: but as they lost the 
thought of Him, the expected Deliverer became a mere 
human being: or rather not a human being; for as they 
lost their moral sense, they lost in the very deepest 
meaning their humanity, and forgot what man was like 
till they learned to look only for a conqueror; a mani- 
festation of power, and not of goodness; a destroyer of 
the hated heathen, who was to establish them as the 
tyrant race of the whole earth. On that fearful day 
on which, for a moment, they cast away even that last 
dream, and cried, "We have no king but Caesar," 
they spoke the secret of their hearts. It was a Caesar, 
a Jewish Caesar, for whom they had been longing for 
centuries. And if they could not have such a deliverer, 
they would have none : they would take up with the 
best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they 
could find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteous- 
ness and Love. Amid all the metaphysical schools of 
Alexandria, I know none so deeply instructive as that 
school of the Rabbis, " the glory of Israel." 

But you will say: "This does not look like a school 
likely to regenerate Alexandrian thought." True: and 
yet it did regenerate it, both for good and for evil; for 
these men had among them and preserved faithfully 
enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of 
their race ; a literature which I firmly believe, if I am 
to trust the experience of 1900 years, is destined to 
explain all other literatures ; because it has firm hold 
of the one eternal root-idea which gives life, meaning, 

f 2 



68 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. ii. 

Divine sanction, to every germ or fragment of human 
truth which is in any of them. It did so, at least, 
in Alexandria for the Greek literature. About the 
Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a disciple 
of Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find 
in the sacred books of his nation that which agreed 
with the deepest discoveries of Greek philosophy ; 
which explained and corroborated them. And his 
announcement of this fact, weak and defective as it 
was, had the most enormous and unexpected results. 
The father of New Platonism was Philo the Jew. 



LECTURE III, 

NEOPLATONISM. 

We now approach the period in which Alexandria 
began to have a philosophy of its own — to be, indeed, 
the leader of hninan thought for several centuries. 

I shall enter on this branch of my subject with 
some fear and trembling ; not only on account of my 
own ignorance, but on account of the great difficulty 
of handling it without trenching on certain contro- 
versial subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden 
here. For there was not one school of Metaphysic at 
Alexandria : there were two ; which, during the whole 
period of their existence, were in internecine struggle 
with each other, and yet mutually borrowing from 
each other ; the Heathen, namely, and the Christian. 
And you cannot contemplate, still less can you under- 
stand, the one without the other. Some of late years 
have become all but unaware of the existence of that 
Christian school; and the word Philosophy, on the 
authority of Gibbon, who, however excellent an 
authority for facts, knew nothing about Philosophy, 
and cared less, has been used exclusively to express 



70 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

heathen thought ; a misnomer which in Alexandria 
would have astonished Plotinus or Hypatia as much as 
it would Clement or Origen. I do not say that there 
is, or ought to be, a Christian Metaphysic. I am 
speaking, as you know, merely as a historian, dealing 
with facts ; and I say that there was one ; as profound, 
as scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neopla- 
tonists ; starting indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on 
many points from common ground with theirs. One 
can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many parts of 
St. John's G-ospel and Epistles, whatever view we may 
take of them, if they are to be called anything, are to 
be called metaphysic and philosophic. And one can 
no more doubt that before writing them he had 
studied Philo, and was expanding PhnVs thought in 
the direction whi©h seemed fit to him, than we can 
doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists. The technical 
language is often identical ; so are the primary ideas 
from which he starts, howsoever widely the conclusions 
may differ. If Plotinus considered himself an intel- 
lectual disciple of Plato, so did Origen and Clemens. 
And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of 
neither. My only hope of escaping delicate ground 
lies in the curious fact, that rightly or wrongly, the 
form in which Christianity presented itself to the old 
Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the 
popular conception of it in modern England, that one 
may very likely be able to tell what little one knows 
about it, almost without mentioning a single doctrine 
which now influences the religious world. 

But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British 
auditory, trained in the school of Locke, much of 
ancient thought, heathen as well as Christian, may 
seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. ?l 

utterly without any corresponding reality in the 
universe, as to look like mere unintelligible madness. 
Still, I must try; only entreating my hearers to con- 
sider, that how much soever we may honour Locke 
and his great Scotch followers, we are not bound to 
believe them either infallible, or altogether world- 
embracing ; that there have been other methods than 
theirs of conceiving the Unseen ; that the common 
ground from which both Christian and heathen Alex- 
andrians start, is not merely a private vagary of their 
own, but one which has been accepted undoubtingly, 
under so many various forms, by so many different 
races, as to give something of an inductive probability 
that it is not a mere dream, but may be a right and true 
instinct of the human mind. I mean the belief that 
the things which we see — nature and all her pheno- 
mena — are temporal, and born only to die; mere 
shadows of some unseen realities, from whom their 
laws and life are derived; while the eternal things 
which subsist without growth, decay, or change, the 
only real, only truly existing things, in short, are 
certain things which are not seen ; inappreciable by 
sense, or understanding, or imagination, perceived 
only by the conscience and the reason. And that, 
again, the problem of philosophy, the highest good 
for man, that for the sake of which death were a gain, 
without which life is worthless, a drudgery, a degra- 
dation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those 
unseen eternal things are, to know them, possess 
them, be in harmony with them, and thereby alone to 
rise to any real and solid power, or safety, or noble- 
ness. It is a strange dream. But you will see that 
it is one which does not bear much upon "points 
of controversy," any more than on " Locke's philo- 



72 ALEXANDRIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. [lect. 

sophy ; " nevertheless, when we find this same strange 
dream arising, apparently withont intercommunion of 
thought, among the old Hindoos, among the Greeks, 
among the Jews ; and lastly, when we see it springing 
again in the Middle Age, in the mind of the almost 
forgotten author of the " Deutsche Theologie," and 
so becoming the parent, not merely of Luther's 
deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great 
German Philosophy itself as developed by Kant, and 
Fichte, and Schelling, and Hegel, we must at least 
confess it to be a popular delusion, if nothing better, 
vast enough and common enough to be worth a little 
patient investigation, wheresoever we may find it 
stirring the human mind. 

But I have hope, still, that I may find sympathy 
and comprehension among some, at least, of my 
audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient realist 
schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge 
of the modern realist schools of Germany. For I 
cannot but see, that a revulsion is taking place in the 
thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic subjects, and 
that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. 
That most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, 
first vindicated the great German Realists from the 
vulgar misconceptions about them which were so 
common at the beginning of this century, and brought 
the minds of studious men to a more just appreciation 
of the philosophic severity, the moral grandeur, of 
such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb 
Fichte. To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, 
has honoured me by his presence here to-night, we 
owe most valuable translations of some of Fichte's 
works ; to be followed, I trust, by more. And 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 73 

though, as a humble disciple of Bacon, I cannot but 
think that the method both of Kant and Fichte 
possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as the 
method of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be 
most unfair did I not express my deep obligations to 
them, and advise all those to study them carefully, 
who wish to gain a clear conception either of the old 
Alexandrian schools, or of those intellectual move- 
ments which are agitating the modern mind, and 
which will, I doubt not, issue in a clearer light, and in 
a nobler life, if not for us, yet still for our children's 
children for ever. 

The name of Philo the Jew is now all but for- 
gotten among us. He was laughed out of sight during 
the last century, as a dreamer and an allegorist, who 
tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses. 
The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to 
suspect that all who thought before the eighteenth 
century were not altogether either fools or impostors ; 
old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, 
and is found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom 
as was supposed. We are beginning, too, to be more 
inclined to justify Providence, by believing that lies 
are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die ; 
that everything which has had any great or permanent 
influence on the human mind, must have in it some 
germ of eternal truth ; and setting ourselves to 
separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which 
may have distorted and overlaid it. Let us believe, or 
at least hope, the same for a few minutes, of Philo, and 
try to find out what was the secret of his power, what 
the secret of his weakness. 

First : I cannot think that he had to treat his own 
sacred books unfairly, to make them agree with the root- 



14, ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

idea of Socrates and Plato. Socrates and Plato acknow- 
ledged a Divine teacher of the human spirit ; that was 
the ground of their philosophy. So did the literature of 
the Jews. Socrates and Plato, with all the Greek 
sages till the Sophistic era, held that the object of 
philosophy was the search after that which truly 
exists : that he who found that, found wisdom : 
Philo's books taught him the same truth : but they 
taught him also, that the search for wisdom was not 
merely the search for that which is, but for Him who 
is ; not for a thing, but for a person. I do not mean 
that Plato and the elder Greeks had not that object 
also in view ; for I have said already that Theology 
was with them the ultimate object of all metaphysic 
science : but I do think that they saw it infinitely less 
clearly than the old Jewish sages. Those sages were 
utterly unable to conceive of an absolute truth, 
except as residing in an absolutely true person; of 
absolute wisdom, except in an absolutely wise person ; 
of an absolute order and law, except in a lawgiver ; 
of an absolute good, except in an absolutely good 
person : any more than either they or we can conceive 
of an absolute love, except in an absolutely loving 
person. I say boldly, that I think them right, on all 
grounds of Baconian induction. For all these qualities 
are only known to us as exhibited in persons ; and if 
we believe them to have any absolute and eternal 
existence at all, to be objective, and independent of 
us, and the momentary moods and sentiments of our 
own mind, they must exist in some absolute and 
eternal person, or they are mere notions, abstractions, 
words, which have no counterparts. 

But here arose a puzzle in the mind of Philo, as it 
in reality had, we may see, in the minds of Socrates 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 76 

and Plato. How could he reconcile the idea of that 
absolute and eternal one Being, that Zeus, Father of 
Gods and men, self-perfect, self-contained, without 
change or motion, in whom, as a Jew, he believed even 
more firmly than the Platonists, with the Dasmon of 
Socrates, the Divine Teacher whom both Plato and 
Solomon confessed ? Or how, again, could he recon- 
cile the idea of Him with the creative and providential 
energy, working in space and time, working on matter, 
and apparently affected and limited, if not baffled, by 
the imperfection of the minds which he taught, by the 
imperfection of the matter which he moulded ? This, 
as all students of philosophy must know, was one of 
the great puzzles of old Greek philosophy, as long as 
it was earnest and cared to have any puzzles at all : it 
has been, since the days of Spinoza, the great puzzle 
of all earnest modern philosophers. Philo offered a 
solution in that idea of a Logos, or Word of God, 
Divinity articulate, speaking and acting in time and 
space, and therefore by successive acts ; and so doing, 
in time and space, the will of the timeless and space- 
less Father, the Abysmal and Eternal Being, of whom 
he was the perfect likeness. In calling this person 
the Logos, and making him the source of all human 
reason, and knowledge of eternal laws, he only trans- 
lated from Hebrew into Greek the name which he 
found in his sacred books, " The Word of God." As 
yet we have found no unfair allegorising of Moses, or 
twisting of Plato. How then has he incurred this 
accusation ? 

I cannot think, again, that he was unfair in suppos- 
ing that he might hold at the same time the Jewish 
belief concerning Creation, and the Platonic doctrine 
of the real existence of Archetypal ideas, both of 



76 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

moral and of physical phenomena. I do not mean 
that such a conception was present consciously to the 
mind of the old Jews, as it was most certainly to the 
mind of St. Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician; but 
it seems to me, as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a 
necessary, corollary from the Genetic Philosophy, both 
of Moses and of Solomon. 

But in one thing he was unfair ; namely, in his 
allegorising. But unfair to whom ? To Socrates and 
Plato, I believe, as much as to Moses and to Samuel. 
For what is the part of the old Jewish books which he 
evaporates away into mere mystic symbols of the 
private experiences of the devout philosopher ? Its 
practical everyday histories, which deal with the 
common human facts of family and national life, of 
man's outward and physical labour and craft. These 
to him have no meaning, except an allegoric one. But 
has he thrown them away for the sake of getting a 
step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle? Surely 
not. To them, as to the old Jewish sages, man is most 
important when regarded not merely as a soul, but as 
a man, a social being of flesh and blood. Aristotle 
declares politics to be the architectonical science, the 
family and social relations to be the eternal master- 
facts of humanity. Plato, in his Republic, sets before 
himself the Constitution of a State, as the crowning 
problem of his philosophy. Every work of his, like 
every saying of his master Socrates, deals with the 
common, outward, vulgar facts of human life, and 
asserts that there is a divine meaning in them, and 
that reverent induction from them is the way to obtain 
the deepest truths. Socrates and Plato were as little 
inclined to separate the man and the philosopher as 
Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were. When Philo, by 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 77 

allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, 
is untrue to Moses's teaching, he becomes untrue to 
Plato's. He becomes untrue, I believe, to a higher 
teachiug than Plato's. He loses sight of an eternal 
truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, 
when he treats Moses as one section of his disciples in 
after years treated Homer. 

For what is the secret of the eternal freshness, the 
eternal beauty, ay, I may say boldly, in spite of all 
their absurdities and immoralities, the eternal righteous- 
ness of those old Greek myths ? What is it which 
made Socrates and Plato cling lovingly and reverently 
to them, they scarce knew why, while they deplored 
the immoralities to which they had given rise ? What 
is it which made those myths, alone of all old mytho- 
logies, the parents of truly beautiful sculpture, paint- 
ing, poetry ? What is it which makes us love them 
still ; find, even at times against our consciences, new 
meaning, new beauty in them ; and brings home the 
story of Perseus or of Hercules, alike to the practised 
reason of Niebuhr, and the untutored instincts of 
Niebuhr's little child, for whom he threw them into 
simplest forms ? Why is it that in spite of our dis- 
agreeing with their creed and their morality, we still 
persist — and long may we persist, or rather be com- 
pelled — as it were by blind instinct, to train our boys 
upon those old Greek dreams ; and confess, whenever 
we try to find a substitute for them in our educational 
schemes, that we have as yet none ? Because those 
old Greek stories do represent the Deities as the arche- 
types, the kinsmen, the teachers, the friends, the 
inspirers of men. Because while the schoolboy reads 
how the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, 
greater; how the Heroes are the children of the Gods, 



18 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

and the slayers of the monsters which devour the 
earth ; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus 
music, and Vulcan the cunning of the stithy ; how 
the Gods took pity on the noble-hearted son of Danae, 
and lent him celestial arms and guided him over desert 
and ocean to fulfil his vow — that boy is learning deep 
lessons of metaphysic, more in accordance with the 
reine vernunft, the pure reason whereby man perceives 
that which is moral, and spiritual, and eternal, than he 
would from all disquisitions about being and be- 
coming, about actualities and potentialities, which ever 
tormented the weary brain of man. 

Let us not despise the gem because it has been 
broken to fragments, obscured by silt and mud. Still 
less let us fancy that one least fragment of it is not 
more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel of 
our own compounding, though it be polished and 
faceted never so completely. For what are all these 
myths but fragments of that great metaphysic idea, 
which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the justifier 
and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man 
has ever discovered, or will discover ; which Philo saw 
partially, and yet clearly; which the Hebrew sages 
perceived far more deeply, because more humanly and 
practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet 
the Apostle, raised to its highest power, when he 
declared that the immutable and self-existent Being, 
for whom the Greek sages sought, and did not alto- 
gether seek in vain, has gathered together all things 
both in heaven and in earth in one inspiring and 
creating Logos, who is both God and Man ? 

Be this as it may, we find that from the time of 
Philo, the deepest thought of the heathen world began 
to flow in a theologic channel. All the great heathen 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 79 

thinkers henceforth are theologians. In the times of 
Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator 
of Stoicism, is no mere speculator concerning entities 
and quiddities, correct or incorrect. He is a slave 
searching for the secret of freedom, and finding that 
it consists in escaping not from a master, but from 
self : not to wealth and power, but to Jove. He dis- 
covers that Jove is, in some most mysterious, but most 
real sense, the Father of men ; he learns to look up to 
that Father as his guide and friend. 

Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man 
who had evidently studied Philo. He perceived so 
deeply, I may say so exaggeratedly, the analogy 
between the Jewish and the Platonic assertions of an 
Absolute and Eternal Being, side by side with the 
assertion of a Divine Teacher of man, that he is said 
to have uttered the startling saying : " What is Plato 
but Moses talking Attic ? " Doubtless Plato is not 
that : but the expression is remarkable, as showing the 
tendency of the age. He too looks up to God with 
prayers for the guidance of his reason. He too enters 
into speculation concerning God in His absoluteness, 
and in His connection with the universe. " The Pri- 
mary God/' he says, " mast be free from works and 
a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise govern- 
ment, going through the heavens. Through Him 
comes this our condition ; through Him Reason being 
sent down in efflux, holds communion with all who are 
prepared for it : God then looking down, and turning 
Himself to each of us, it comes to pass that our bodies 
live and are nourished, receiving strength from the 
outer rays which come from Him. But when God 
turns us to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to 
pass that these things are worn out and consumed, 



80 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

but that the reason lives, being partaker of a blessed 
life." 

This passage is exceedingly interesting, as con- 
taining both the marrow of old Hebrew metaphysic, 
and also certain notional elements, of which we find 
no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead — as we 
shall find they afterwards did lead — to confusing the 
moral with the notional, and finally the notional with 
the material ; in plain words, to Pantheism. 

You find this tendency, in short, in all the philo- 
sophers who flourished between the age of Augustus 
and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism. Gibbon, 
while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet 
" Philosophic Emperor," Marcus Aurelius, blinks the 
fact that Marcuses philosophy, like that of Plutarch, 
contains as an integral element, a belief which to him 
would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its 
strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian 
Apostle. What is Marcus Aurelius's cardinal doctrine ? 
That there is a God within him, a Word, a Logos, 
which " has hold of him," and who is his teacher and 
guardian ; that over and above his body and his soul, 
he has a Reason which is capable of " hearing that 
Divine Word, and obeying the monitions of that God." 
What is Plutarch's cardinal doctrine ? That the same 
Word, the Dasmon who spoke to the heart of Socrates, 
is speaking to him and to every philosopher; "coming 
into contact," he says, " with him in some wonderful 
manner ; addressing the reason of those who, like 
Socrates, keep their reason pure, not under the dominion 
of passion, nor mixing itself greatly with the body, and 
therefore quick and sensitive in responding to that 
which encountered it. 

You see from these two extracts what questions 



UiJ NEOPLATONISM* 81 

were arising" in the minds of men, and how they touched 
on ethical and theological questions. I say arising in 
their minds : I believe that I ought to say rather, 
stirred up in their minds by One greater than they. 
At all events, there they appeared, utterly independent 
of any Christian teaching. The belief in this Logos or 
Da3mon speaking to the Reason of man, was one which 
neither Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor 
Ammonius, as far as we can see, learnt from the 
Christians; it was the common ground which they held 
with them ; the common battlefield which they disputed 
with them. 

Neither have we any reason to suppose that they 
learnt it from the Hindoos. That much Hindoo 
thought mixed with Neoplatonist speculation we cannot 
doubt ; but there is not a jot more evidence to prove 
that Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the 
Mahabharavata, than that George Fox the Quaker, or 
the author of the " Deutsche Theologie," did so. They 
may have gone to Hindoo philosophy, or rather, to 
second and third hand traditions thereof, for corrobo- 
rations of the belief ; but be sure, it must have existed 
in their own hearts first, or they would never have 
gone thither. Believe it; be sure of it. No earnest 
thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never 
borrow from others that which he has not already, 
more or less, thought out for himself. When once 
a great idea, instinctive, inductive (for the two ex- 
pressions are nearer akin than most fancy), has dawned 
on his soul, he will welcome lovingly, awfully, any 
corroboration from foreign schools, and cry with joy : 
" Behold, this is not altogether a dream : for others 
have found it also. Surely it must be real, universal, 
eternal." No ; be sure there is far more originality 
vol. i. — h. e. o 



82 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

(in the common sense of the word), and far less (in the 
true sense of the word), than we fancy; and that it 
is a paltry and shallow doctrine which represents each 
succeeding school as merely the puppets and dupes of 
the preceding. More originality, because each earnest 
man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds 
of his creed. Less originality, because, as I believe, one 
common Logos, Word, Reason, reveals and unveils the 
same eternal truth to all who seek and hunger for it. 

Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of 
Alexandria did, rejoice over every truth which their 
heathen adversaries beheld, and attribute them, as 
Clement does, to the highest source, to the inspiration 
of the one and universal Logos. With Clement, philo- 
sophy is only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and 
philosophy falsely so called; true philosophy is an image 
of the truth, a divine gift bestowed on the Greeks. 
The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art and 
wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no 
doubt some peculiar endowment of nature, but when 
they have offered themselves for their work, they 
receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, 
giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all 
cultivation of sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual 
endowment. The whole intellectual discipline of the 
Greeks, with their philosophy, came down from God 
to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries 
on " an inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of 
Being; and this Truth is that concerning which the 
Lord Himself said : ' I am the Truth/ And when 
the initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, 
they have it from the Truth itself ; that is from Him 
who is true." 

While, then, these two schools had so many grounds 



In.] NEOPLATONISM. '<$ 

in common, where was their point of divergence ? We 
shall find it, I believe, fairly expressed in the dying 
words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism. 
cl I am striving to bring the God which is in ns into 
harmony with the God which is in the universe. " 
Whether or not Plotinns actually so spoke, that was 
what his disciples not only said that he spoke, but 
what they would have wished him to speak. That 
one sentence expresses the whole object of their 
philosophy. 

But to that PantEenus, Origen, Clement, and Augus- 
tine would have answered : " And we, on the other 
hand, assert that the God which is in the universe, is 
the same as the God which is in you, and is striving 
to bring you into harmony with Himself."" There is 
the experimentum cruris. There is the vast gulf 
between the Christian and the Heathen schools, which 
when any man had overleaped, the whole problem of 
the universe was from that moment inverted. With 
Plotinus and his school man is seeking for God : with 
Clement and his, God is seeking for man. With the 
former, God is passive, and man active: with the 
latter, God is active, man is passive — passive, that is, 
in so far as his business is to listen when he is spoken 
to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to 
submit himself to the inward laws which he feels 
reproving and checking him at every turn, as Socrates 
was reproved and checked by his inward DaBinon. 

Whether of these two theorems gives the higher 
conception either of the Divine Being, or of man, I 
leave it for you to judge. To those old Alexandrian 
Christians, a being who was not seeking after every 
single creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a 
Being of absolute Righteousness, Power, Love ; could 

o 2 



84 ALEXAtfDEIA AND EEE SCHOOLS. [lect. 

not be a Being worthy of respect or admiration, even 
of philosophic speculation. Human righteousness and 
love flows forth disinterestedly to all around it, how- 
ever unconscious, however unworthy they may be ; 
human power associated with goodness, seeks for 
objects which it may raise and benefit by that power. 
We must confess this, with the Christian schools, or, 
with the Heathen schools, we must allow another 
theory, which brought them into awful depths; which 
may bring any generation which holds it into the 
same depths. 

If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists : " You 
believe, Plotinus, in an absolutely Good Being. Do 
you believe that it desires to shed forth its goodness 
on all ? " " Of course/' they would have answered, 
" on those who seek for it, on the philosopher. - " 

" But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the 
brutal, ignorant mass, wallowing in those foul crimes 
above which you have risen ? " And at that question 
there would have been not a little hesitation. These 
brutes in human form, these souls wallowing in earthly 
mire, could hardly, in the Neoplatonists' eyes, be 
objects of the Divine desire. 

" Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has 
no relation with them, no care to raise them. In fact, 
it cannot raise them, because they have nothing in 
common with it. Is that your notion ? " And the 
Neoplatonists would have, on the whole, allowed that 
argument. And if Clement had answered, that such 
was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being, 
and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute 
Good, careless of the degradation and misery around 
it, must be something very different from his notions 
of human goodness ; the Neoplatonists would have 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 85 

answered — indeed they did answer — ee After all, why 
not ? Why should the Absolute Goodness be like our 
human goodness ? " This is Plotinus's own belief. It 
is a question with him, it was still more a question with 
those who came after him, whether virtues could be 
predicated of the Divine nature; courage, for instance, 
of one who had nothing to fear ; self-restraint, of one 
who had nothing to desire. And thus, by setting up 
a different standard of morality for the divine and for 
the human, Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, 
that virtue is not the end, but the means; not the 
Divine nature itself, as the Christian schools held, but 
only the purgative process by which man was to 
ascend into heaven, and which was necessary to arrive 
at that nature — that nature itself being — what ? 

And how to answer that last question was the 
abysmal problem of the whole of Neoplatonic philo- 
sophy, in searching for which it wearied itself out, 
generation after generation, till tired equally of seek- 
ing and of speaking, it fairly lay down and died. In 
proportion as it refused to acknowledge a common 
divine nature with the degraded mass, it deserted its 
first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual 
world is identical with the moral world, with right, 
love, justice ; it tried to find new definitions for the 
spiritual ; it conceived it to be identical with the 
intellectual. That did not satisfy its heart. It had to 
repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of 
its proper denizens, with ghosts ; to reinvent the old 
daemonologies and polytheisms — from thence to descend 
into lower depths, of which we will speak hereafter. 

But in the meanwhile we must look at another 
quarrel which arose between the two twin schools of 
Alexandria, The Neoplatonists said that there is a 



86 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

divine element in man. The Christian philosophers 
assented fervently, and raised the old disagreeable 
question : "Is it in every man ? In the publicans and 
harlots as well as in the philosophers ? We say that 
it is/' And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over 
hard to assent to a doctrine, equally contrary to out- 
ward appearance, and galling to Pharisaic pride ; and 
enters into a hundred honest self-puzzles and self- 
contradictions, which seem to justify him at last 
in saying, No. It is in the philosopher, who is ready 
by nature, as Plotinus has it, and as it were furnished 
with wings, and not needing to sever himself from 
matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend to 
that which is above. And in a degree too, it is in the 
"lover," who, according to Plotinus, has a certain 
innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round it, and 
desires it, wherever he sees it. Him you may raise to 
the apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by 
teaching him to separate beauty from the various 
objects in which it appears scattered and divided. 
And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom 
there is hope, namely, the musical man, capable of 
being passively affected by beauty, without having 
any active appetite for it ; the sentimentalist, in short, 
as we should call him nowadays. 

But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is 
anything divine in them. And thus it gradually comes 
out in all Neoplatonist writings which I have yet ex- 
amined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in pro- 
portion as he is conscious of its existeuce in him. 
From which spring two conceptions of the Divine in 
man. First, is it a part of him, if it is dependent for 
its existence on his consciousness of it ? Or is it, as 
Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have helc^ as 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 87 

the Christians held, something independent of him, 
without him, a Logos or Word speaking to his reason 
and conscience ? With this question Plotinus grapples, 
earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he 
does it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of 
the sixth Ennead, especially if you be lucky enough to 
light on a copy of that rare book, Taylor's faithful 
though crabbed translation. 

Not that the result of his search is altogether 
satisfactory. He enters into subtle and severe dis- 
quisitions concerning soul. Whether it is one or 
many. How it can be both one and many. He has 
the strongest perception that, to use the noble saying 
of the Germans, "Time and Space are no gods." He 
sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world 
of truly existing being, is independent of time and 
space : and yet, after he has wrestled with the two 
Titans, through page after page, and apparently con- 
quered them, they slip in again uuawares into the 
battle-field, the moment his back is turned. He 
denies that the one Reason has parts — it must exist as 
a whole wheresoever it exists : and yet he cannot ex- 
press the relation of the individual soul to it, but by 
saying that we are parts of it; or that each thing, 
down to the lowest, receives as much soul as it is capable 
of possessing. Bitter has worked out at length, 
though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred 
contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus ; 
contradictions which I suspect to be inseparable from 
any philosophy starting from his grounds. Is he not 
looking for the spiritual in a region where it does not 
exist ; in the region of logical conceptions and abstrac- 
tions, which are not realities, but only, after all, symbols 
of our own, whereby we express to ourselves the pro- 



88 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

cesses of our own brain ? May not his Christian con- 
temporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well 
as nearer the common sense and practical belief of 
mankind, in holding that that which is spiritual is per- 
sonal, and can only be seen or conceived of as residing 
in persons ; and that that which is personal is moral, 
and has to do, not with, abstractions of the intellect, 
but with right and wrong, love and hate, and all which, 
in the common instincts of men, involves a free will, a 
free judgment, a free responsibility and desert ? And 
that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic 
Element, an universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine 
Element, closely connected with man, that one Reason, 
that one Divine Element, must be a person also ? At 
least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen 
schools in this direction, that the followers of Plotinus 
had to fill up the void which yawned between man and 
the invisible things after which he yearned, by reviving 
the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a 
Dgemonology borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and 
partly from the Jewish rabbis, which formed a des- 
cending chain of persons, downward from the highest 
Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each 
man ; the meed of the philosopher being, that by self- 
culture and self-restraint he could rise above the 
tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and 
become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself. 
These contradictions need not lower the great 
Father of Neoplatonism in our eyes, as a moral being. 
All accounts of him seem to prove him to have been 
what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have 
been, " good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, 
and pleasant in all his conversation.'" He gave good 
advice about earthly matters, was a faithful steward 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 89 

of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and 
orphans, a righteous and loving man. In his practical 
life, the ascetic and gnostic element comes out strongly 
enough. The body, with him, was not evil, neither 
was it good ; it was simply nothing — why care about 
it ? He would have no portrait taken of his person : 
" It was humiliating enough to be obliged to carry a 
shadow about with him, without having a shadow made 
of that shadow." He refused animal food, abstained 
from baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and 
so died about 200 a.d. 

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such 
cases, that the weakness of his conceptions comes out. 
Plotinus was an earnest thinker, slavishly enough 
reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as 
an infallible oracle, with a " He says," as if there were 
but one he in the universe : but he tried honestly to 
develop Plato, or what he conceived to be Plato, on the 
method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is 
far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of 
those who come after him. He is a seeker. His 
followers are not. The great work which marks the 
second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a 
justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all 
possible theurgies and superstitions ; perhaps the best 
attempt of the kind which the world has ever seen ; 
that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an 
inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic 
assertion, patched together from all accessible rags 
and bones of the dead world. Some here will, perhaps, 
guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of 
Iamblichus and Proclus. 

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work 
usually attributed to him, which describes itself as the 



90 ALEXANDEIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

letter of Abamnon tlie Teacher to Porphyry, lie became 
the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell back 
on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the 
more rational, though more hopeless, school of Por- 
phyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with all his dislike of 
magic and the vulgar superstitions — a dislike intimately 
connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the 
common herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a 
religion for the common herd — did not believe a fact 
or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat un- 
philosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, 
trying to crush Plotinus by magic arts, had his 
weapons so completely turned against himself, that all 
his limbs were contracted. From him we learn that 
Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his 
familiar spirit, a god, and not a mere daemon, appeared. 
He writes sensibly enough however to one Anebos, an 
Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular 
notions of the Gods, as beings subject to human 
passions and vices, and of theurgy and magic, as 
material means of compelling them to appear, or 
alluring them to favour man. The answer of Abamnon, 
Anebos, Iamblichus, or whoever the real author may 
have been, is worthy of perusal by every metaphysical 
student, as a curious phase of thought, not confined to 
that time, but rife, under some shape or other, in every 
age of the world's history, and in this as much as in 
any. There are many passages full of eloquence, many 
more full of true and noble thought : but on the whole, 
it is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; 
the attempt to suit the old superstition to the new 
one, by eclectically picking and choosing, and special 
pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 91 

worse. There is no base superstition which Abamnon 
does not unconsciously justify. And yet he is rapidly 
losing sight of the real eternal human germs of truth 
round which those superstitions clustered, and is really 
further from truth and reason than old Homer or 
Hesiod, because further from the simple, universal, 
everyday facts, and relations, and duties of man, which 
are, after all, among the most mysterious, and also 
among the most sacred objects which man can 
contemplate. 

It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism 
took the course it did. Spirit, they felt rightly, was 
meant to rule matter ; it was to be freed from matter 
only for that very purpose. No one could well deny 
that. The philosopher, as he rose and became, accord- 
ing to Plotinus, a god, or at least approached toward the 
gods, must partake of some mysterious and transcen- 
dental power. No one could well deny that conclusion, 
granting the premiss. But of what power? What 
had he to show as the result of his intimate communion 
with an unseen Being ? The Christian Schools, who 
held that the spiritual is the moral, answered accord- 
ingly. He must show righteousness, and love, and 
peace in a Holy Spirit. That is the likeness of God. 
In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a 
Divine nature. He can rise no higher, and he needs 
no more. Platonists had said — No, that is only virtue; 
and virtue is the means, not the end. We want proof 
of having something above that; something more than 
any man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform ; 
something above nature ; portents and wonders. So 
they set to work to perform wonders ; and succeeded, 
I suppose, more or less. For now one enters into a 



92 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

whole fairyland of those very phenomena which are 
puzzling us so nowadays — ecstasy, clairvoyance, insen- 
sibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of what 
we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these 
modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone 
seekers for wisdom. It makes us love them, while it 
saddens us to see that their difficulties were the same 
as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun. 
Of course, a great deal of it all was " imagination." 
But the question then, as now is, what is this wonder- 
working imagination ? — unless the word be used as a 
mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases, 
is hardly fair. We cannot wonder at the old Neo- 
platonists for attributing these strange phenomena to 
spiritual influence, when we see some who ought to 
know better doing the same thing now; and others, 
who more wisely believe them to be strictly physical 
and nervous, so utterly unable to give reasons for them, 
that they feel it expedient to ignore them for awhile, 
till they know more about those physical phenomena 
which can be put under some sort of classification, and 
attributed to some sort of inductive law. 

But again. These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, 
brought them rapidly back to the old priestcrafts. 
The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and Jewish 
sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and 
reduced it to an art. It was by sleeping in the temples 
of the deities, after due mesmeric manipulations, that 
cures were even then effected. Surely the old priests 
were the people to whom to go for information. The 
old philosophers of Greece were venerable. How much 
more those of the East, in comparison with whom the 
Greeks were children ? Besides, if these dasmons and 
deities were so near them, might it not be possible to 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 93 

behold them. ? They seemed to have given up caring 
much for the world and its course — 

Effugerant adytis templisque relictis 
Di quibus imperium steterat. 

The old priests used to make them appear — perhaps 
they might do it again. And if spirit could act directly 
and preternaturally on matter, in spite of the laws of 
matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit. After all, 
were matter and spirit so absolutely different ? Was 
not spirit some sort of pervading essence, some subtle 
ethereal fluid, differing from matter principally in 
being less gross and dense ? This was the point to 
which they went down rapidly enough ; the point to 
which all philosophies, I firmly believe, will descend, 
which do not keep in sight that the spiritual means the 
moral. In trying to make it mean exclusively the 
intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely 
logical and abstract ; and when that is found to be a 
barren and lifeless phantom, a mere projection of the 
human brain, attributing reality to mere conceptions 
and names, and confusing the subject with the object, 
as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in 
despair, the school will try to make the spiritual some- 
thing real, or, at least, something conceivable, by 
reinvesting it with the properties of matter, and talking 
of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or 
electricity, or force, pervading time and space, con- 
ditioned by the accidents of brute matter, and a part 
of that nature which is born to die. 

The culmination of all this confusion we see in 
Proclus. The unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most 
important personage between him and Iamblichus, has 
left no writings to our times ; we can only judge of her 



94 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

doctrine by that of Iier instructors and her pupils. 
Proclus was taught by the men who had heard her 
lecture; and the golden chain of the Platonic succession 
descended from her to him. His throne, however, was 
at Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the 
maiden philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to 
Greece. But Proclus is so essentially the child of the 
Alexandrian school that we cannot pass him over. 
Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly 
informed, he is the Greek philosopher ; the flower and 
crown of all its schools ; in whom, says the learned 
Frenchman, "are combined, and from whom shine 
forth, in no irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, 
Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, Porphyry, 
and Iamblichus ; " and who ' { had so comprehended 
all religions in his mind, and paid them such equal 
reverence, that he was, as it were, the priest of the 
whole universe ! " 

I have not the honour of knowing much of 
M. Cousin's works. I never came across them but on 
one small matter of fact, and on that I found him 
copying at second hand an anachronism which one 
would have conceived palpable to any reader of the 
original authorities. This is all I know of him, saving 
these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted 
only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in 
Mr. Thomas Carlyle's words, " What things men will 
worship, in their extreme need ! " Other moderns, 
however, have expressed their admiration of Proclus ; 
and, no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him 
(for after all he was a Greek), which will be both 
pleasing and useful to those who consider philosophic 
method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant 
apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. $5 

coherence: but of the method of Plato or Aristotle,, any 
more than of that of Kant or Mill, you. will find nothing 
in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at once the 
most timid and servile of commentators, and the most 
cloudy of declaimers. He can rave symbolism like 
Jacob Bohmen, but without an atom of his originality 
and earnestness. He can develop an inverted pyramid 
of dasmonology, like Father Newman himself, but 
without an atom of his art, his knowledge of human 
cravings. He combines all schools, truly, Chaldee and 
Egyptian as well as Greek ; but only scraps from their 
mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy 
the heart and conscience as little as they do the logical 
faculties. His Greek gods and heroes, even his 
Alcibiades and Socrates, are "ideas;" that is, symbols 
of certain notions or qualities : their flesh and bones, 
their heart and brain, have been distilled away, till 
nothing is left but a word, a notion, which may patch 
a hole in his huge heaven-and-earth-embracing system. 
He, too, is a commentator and a deducer ; all has been 
discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more. 
Those who followed him seem to have commented on 
his comments. With him Neoplatonism properly ends. 
Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall ? Have the 
Titans scaled heaven, or died of old age, " exhibiting/ ' 
as Gibbon says of them, u a deplorable instance of the 
senility of the human mind ? " Read Proclus, and 
judge for yourselves: but first contrive to finish every- 
thing else you have to do which can possibly be useful 
to any human being. Life is short, and Art — at least 
the art of obtaining practical guidance from the last 
of the Alexandrians — very long. 

And yet — if Proclus and his school became gradually 
unfaithful to the great root-idea of their philosophy, 



96 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lecT. 

we must not imitate them. We must not believe that 
the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine 
teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into 
confused notions of what that teaching was like. 
Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus ; and it too 
came from the only source whence all good comes. 
Were there no good in him I could not laugh at him as I 
have done ; I could only hate him. There are moments 
when he rises above his theories; moments when he 
recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of 
Homer, almost to the faith of Philo. Whether these 
are the passages of his which his modern admirers 
prize most, I cannot tell. I should fancy not : never- 
theless I will read you one of them. 

He is about to commence his discourses on the 
Parmenides, that book in which we generally now 
consider that Plato has been most untrue to himself, 
and fallen from his usual inductive method to the 
ground of a mere a priori theoriser — and yet of which 
Proclus is reported to have said, and, I should conceive, 
said honestly, that if it, the Timasus, and the Orphic 
fragments were preserved, he did not care whether 
every other book on earth were destroyed. But how 
does he commence ? 

" I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my 
reason in the speculation which lies before me, and 
having kindled in me the pure light of truth, to direct 
my mind upward to the very knowledge of the things 
which are, and to open the doors of my soul to receive 
the divine guidance of Plato, and, having directed my 
knowledge into the very brightness of being, to 
withdraw me from the various forms of opinion, from 
the apparent wisdom, from the wandering about things 
which do not exist, by that purest intellectual exercise 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 97 

about tlie things which do exist, whereby alone the 
eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as Socrates 
says in the Pheedrus; and that the Noetic Gods will 
give to me the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the 
power which leads up to this, and that the rulers of the 
Universe above the heaven will impart to me an energy 
unshaken by material notions and emancipated from 
them, and those to whom the world is given as their 
dominion a winged life, and the angelic choirs a true 
manifestation of divine things, and the good dgemons 
the fulness of the inspiration which comes from the 
Gods, and the heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty 
fixedness of mind, and the whole divine race together 
a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's most 
mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares 
to us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity 
befitting such topics, but which he (i.e. his master 
Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous 
apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic 
feast, and was the medium for transmitting the divine 
truth, the guide in our speculations, and the hierophant 
of these divine words ; who, as I think, came down 
as a type of philosophy, to do good to the souls that 
are here, in place of idols, sacrifices, and the whole 
mystery of purification, a leader of salvation to the 
men who are now and who shall be hereafter. And 
may the whole band of those who are above us be 
propitious ; and may the whole force which they supply 
be at hand, kindling before us that light which, 
proceeding from them, may guide us to them." 

Surely this is an interesting document. The last 

Pagan Greek prayer, I believe, which we have on 

record ; the death-wail of the old world — not without 

a touch of melody. One cannot altogether admire the 

vol. i. — h. e. a 



98 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

style; it is inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with, a 
considerable consciousness that he was saying the 
right thing and in the very finest way : but still it is 
a prayer. A cry for light — by no means, certainly, 
like that noble one in Tennyson's " In Memoriam : " 

So runs my dream. But what am I ? 

An infant crying in the night ; 

An infant crying for the light ; 
And with no language but a cry. 

Yet he asks for light : perhaps he had settled already 
for himself — like too many more of us — what sort of 
light he chose to have : but still the eye is turned 
upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that 
self is its own illumination. He asks — surely not in 
vain. There was light to be had for asking. That 
prayer certainly was not answered in the letter : it 
may have been ere now in the spirit. And yet it is 
a sad prayer enough. Poor old man, and poor old 
philosophy ! 

This he and his teachers had gained by despising 
the simpler and yet far profounder doctrine of the 
Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine Teacher 
in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was 
the very archetype of men, and that He had proved that 
fact by being made flesh, and dwelling bodily among 
them, that they might behold His glory, full of grace and 
truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man 
and the perfection of God : that that which was most 
divine was most human, and that which was most human, 
most divine. That was the outcome of their meta- 
physic, that they had found the Absolute One ; because 
One existed in whom the apparent antagonism between 
that which is eternally and that which becomes in 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 99 

time, between the ideal and the actual, between the 
spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and 
man, was explained and reconciled for ever. 

And Proclus's prayer, on the other hand, was the 
outcome of the Neoplatonists' metaphysic, the end 
of all their search after the One, the Indivisible, the 
Absolute, this cry to all manner of innumerable 
phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, neither 
things nor persons,but thoughts, to give the philosopher 
each something or other, according to the nature of 
each. Not that he very clearly defines what each is 
to give him ; but still he feels himself in want of all 
manner of things, and it is as well to have as many 
friends at court as possible — Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, 
rulers, angels, daemons, heroes — to enable him to do 
what ? To understand Plato's most mystical and far- 
seeing speculations. The Eternal Nous, the In- 
tellectual Teacher has vanished further and further 
off ; further off still some dim vision of a supreme 
Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through 
the mist of the abyss a Primaeval One. But even that 
has a predicate, for it is one ; it is not pure essence. 
Must there not be something beyond that again, 
which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, 
absolute ? What an abyss ! How shall the human 
mind find anything whereon to rest, in the vast 
nowhere between it aud the object of its search ? 
The search after the One issues in a wail to the 
innumerable ; and kind gods, angels, and heroes, not 
human indeed, but still conceivable enough to satisfy 
at least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as 
they have done since, and may do again ; and so, as 
Mr. Carlyle has it, "the bottomless pit got roofed 
over," as it may be again ere long. 

H 2 



100 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a 
failure ? That Alexandria, during four centuries of 
profound and earnest thought, added nothing ? 
Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy 
which has exercised on European thought, at the 
crisis of its noblest life and action, an influence as great 
as did the Aristotelian system during the Middle Ages. 
We must never forget, that during the two centuries 
which commence with the fall of Constantinople, and 
end with our civil wars, not merely almost all great 
thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen, warriors, poets, 
were more or less Neoplatonists. The Greek gram- 
marians, who migrated into Italy, brought with them 
the works of Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus ; and 
their gorgeous reveries were welcomed eagerly by the 
European mind, just revelling in the free thought of 
youthful manhood. And yet the Alexandrian im- 
potence for any practical and social purposes was to 
be manifested, as utterly as it was in Alexandria or in 
Athens of old. Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola 
worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or 
polity, at a time when such deliverance was needed 
bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was petted by 
luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play 
of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real 
power, their practical system, neither good nor 
harm. And one cannot help feeling-, while reading 
the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which 
Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier/' puts 
into the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near 
mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantism or to 
Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in England, 
during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of 



in.] NEOPLATONISM. 101 

Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical 
life which men were compelled to live in those great 
times j by the strong hold which they had of the 
ideas of family and national life, of law and personal 
faith. And I cannot but believe it to have been a 
mighty gain to such men as Sidney, Raleigh, and 
Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of 
the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read 
Spenser's "Fairy Queen/' above all his Garden of 
Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling 
that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from 
many a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow 
and bitter dogmatism, which was even then torment- 
ing the English mind, and must have helped to give him 
altogether a freer and more loving conception, if not 
a consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous harmony 
of that mysterious analogy between the physical and 
the spiritual, which alone makes poetry (and I had 
almost said philosophy also) possible, and have taught 
him to behold alike in suns and planets, in flowers and 
insects, in man and in beings higher than man, one 
glorious order of love and wisdom, linking them all 
to Him from whom they all proceed, rays from His 
cloudless sunlight, mirrors of His eternal glory. 

But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own 
fertility, gave place to the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran 
through much the same changes. It was good for us, 
after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans, un- 
philosophical as they were, swept it away. One feels 
in reading the later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, 
even Cudworth (valuable as he is), that the old 
accursed distinction between the philosopher, the 
scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, 



i6£ ALEXANDKIA AND HEK SCHOOLS. [lect. Ill 

was growing up again very fast. The school from 
which the " Eeligio Medici" issued was not likely to 
make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise. 

Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote 
poor old Proclus as an irrefragable authority, and 
believing that he, forsooth, represented the sense of 
Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but 
little chance in the world. Bacon had been right 
in his dislike of Platonism years before, though he 
was unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom 
he was really reviling; Proclus as Plato's com- 
mentator and representative. The lion had for once 
got into the ass's skin, and was treated accordingly. 
The true Platonic method* that dialectic which the 
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be 
tried, both in England and in Germany; and I am 
much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it be not found 
the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy ; 
in fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the 
expressions of Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural 
phenomena, as the expressions of Physical ones. If 
you wish to see the highest instances of this method, 
read Plato himself, not Proclus. If you wish to see 
how the same method can be applied to Christian 
truth, read the dialectic passages in Augustine's 
" Confessions." Whether or not you shall agree with 
their conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have 
a truly scientific habit of mind, to complain that they 
want either profundity, severity, or simplicity. 

So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian 
schools of Metaphysic. What was the fate of the 
other is a subject which I must postpone to my next 
Lecture. 



LECTUEE IV. 

THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 

I tried to point out, in rny last Lecture, the causes 
which led to the decay of the Pagan metaphysic of 
Alexandria. We have now to consider the fate of the 
Christian school. 

You may have remarked that I have said little or 
nothing about the positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, 
and their disciples ; but have only brought out the 
especial points of departure between them and the 
Heathens. My reason for so doing was twofold : first, 
I could not have examined them without entering on 
controversial ground ; next, I am very desirous to 
excite some of my hearers, at least, to examine these 
questions for themselves. 

I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to 
which many of late have given way, that the Alex- 
andrian divines were mere mystics, who corrupted 
Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek 
thought. My own belief is that they expanded and 
corroborated Christianity, in spite of great errors and 
defects on certain points, far more than they corrupted 
it ; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated 



104 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS/ [lect. 

and scientific men in the only form in which it would 
have satisfied their philosophic aspirations, and yet 
contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to ground their 
philosophy on the yery same truths which they 
taught to the meanest slaves, and to appeal in 
the philosophers to the same inward faculty to which 
they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward 
eye, that moral sense and reason, whereby each and 
every man can, if he will, iC judge of himself that 
which is right."" I boldly say that I believe the 
Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps 
the only, attempt yet made by men, to proclaim a true 
world-philosophy; whereby I mean a philosophy 
common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing 
the whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitra- 
rily small portion of them, and capable of being under- 
stood and appreciated by every human being from the 
highest to the lowest. And when you hear of a system 
of reserve in teaching, a discijolina arcani, of an 
esoteric and exoteric, an inner and outer school, 
among these men, you must not be frightened at the 
words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual 
aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for them- 
selves, and gave the husks to the mob. It was not so 
with the Christian schools ; it was so with the Heathen 
ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the 
herd, should have the husks. Their avowed intention 
and wish was to leave the herd, as they called them, in 
the mere outward observance of the old idolatries, 
while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers, had 
the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which 
were contained under the old superstitions, and were 
too sacred to be profaned by the vulgar eyes. The 
Christian method was the exact opposite. They 



iv.] THE CEOSS AND THE CRESCENT. 105 

boldly called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very 
holy of holies, and there gaze on the very deepest root- 
ideas of their philosophy. They owned no ground for 
their own speculations which was not common to the 
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what 
enabled them to do this; this was what brought on 
them the charge of demagogism, the hatred of philo- 
sophers, the persecution of princes — that their ground 
was a moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; 
that they started, not from any notions of the under- 
standing, but from the inward conscience, that truly 
pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral 
spheres are united, which they believed to exist, how- 
ever dimmed or crushed, in every human being, 
capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to 
a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing moral 
from their disciples : only they forbade them to meddle 
with intellectual matters, before they had had a regular 
intellectual training. The witnesses of reason and 
conscience were sufficient guides for all men, and at 
them the many might well stop short. The teacher 
only needed to proceed further, not into a higher 
region, but into a lower one, namely, into the region of 
the logical understanding, and there make deductions 
from, and illustrations of, those higher truths which 
he held in common with every slave, and held on the 
same ground as they. 

And the consequence of this method of philosophis- 
ing was patent. They were enabled to produce, in 
the lives of millions, generation after generation, a 
more immense moral improvement than the world had 
ever seen before. Their disciples did actually become 
righteous and good men, just in proportion as they 
were true to the lessons they learnt. They did, for 



106 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect- 

centuries, work a distinct and palpable deliverance on 
the earth ; while all the solemn and earnest meditation 
of the Neoplatonists, however good or true, worked no 
deliverance whatsoever. Plotinns longed at one time 
to make a practical attempt. He asked the Emperor 
Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in 
Campania ; to allow him to call it Platonopolis, and 
put it into the hands of him and his disciples, that 
they might there realise Plato's ideal republic. Luckily 
for the reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme was 
swamped by the courtiers of Gallienus, and the earth 
was saved the sad and ludicrous sight of a realised 
Laputa ; probably a very quarrelsome one. That was 
his highest practical conception : the foundation of a 
new society : not the regeneration of society as it 
existed. 

That work was left for the Christian schools ; and 
up to a certain point they performed it. They made 
men good. This was the test, which of the schools 
was in the right : this was the test, which of the two 
had hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic. Cicero 
says, that he had learnt more philosophy from the 
Laws of the Twelve Tables than from all the Greeks. 
Clement and his school might have said the same of 
the Hebrew Ten Commandments and Jewish Law, 
which are so marvellously analogous to the old Roman 
laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supreme 
Being, a Jupiter — literally a Heavenly Father — who 
is the source and the sanction of law ; of whose justice 
man's justice is the pattern; who is the avenger of 
crimes against marriage, property, life ; on whom 
depends the sanctity of an oath. And so, to compare 
great things with small, there was a truly practical 
human element here in the Christian teaching ; purely 



iv.] THE CKOSS AND THE CRESCENT. 107 

ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the 
simplest and lowest, which gave to it a regenerating 
force which the highest efforts of Neoplatonism could 
never attain. 

And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously 
enough, rotted away, and perished hideously. Most 
true. But what if the causes of its decay and death 
were owing to its being untrue to itself ? 

I do not say that they had no excuses for being 
untrue to their own faith. We are not here to judge 
them. That peculiar subtlety of mind, which rendered 
the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world, 
had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of 
alluring them away from practice to speculation. The 
Christian school, as was to be expected from the moral 
ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far more 
slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and 
especially after they had conquered and expelled the 
Heathen school. Moreover, the long battle with the 
Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of 
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot 
assert a fact, without dogmatising rashly and harshly 
on the consequences of denying that fact. Their 
minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness. 
Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fight- 
ing each other, excommunicating each other; denying 
to all who differed from them any share of that light, 
to claim which for all men had been the very ground 
of their philosophy. Not that they would have refused 
the Logos to all men in words. They would have 
cursed a man for denying the existence of the Logos 
in every man; but they would have equally cursed 
him for acting on his existence in practice, and treat- 
ing the heretic as one who had that within him to 



108 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became 
Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, 
as to forget that a truth is meant to be used, and not 
merely asserted — if, indeed, the fierce assertion of a 
truth in frail man is not generally a sign of some 
secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his 
practical living faith in it : just as he who is always 
telling you that he is a man, is not the most likely to 
behave like a man. And why did this befall them ? 
Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded 
from a Person. They could argue over notions and 
dogmas deduced from the notion of His personality: 
but they were shut up in those notions ; they had for- 
gotten that if He was a Person, His eye was on them, 
His rule and kingdom within them; and that if He 
was a Person, He had a character, and that that 
character was a righteous and a loving character : and 
therefore they were not ashamed, in defending these 
notions and dogmas about Him, to commit acts ab- 
horrent to His character, to lie, to slander, to intrigue, 
to hate, even to murder, for the sake of what they 
madly called His glory : but which was really only 
their own glory — the glory of their own dogmas ; of 
propositions and conclusions in their own brain, which, 
true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, 
because they used them only as watchwords of division. 
Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of 
God, for they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and 
love, and peace. That Divine Logos, and theology as 
a whole, receded further and further aloft into abysmal 
heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead 
scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their 
hearts and lives ; and then they, as the Neoplatonists 
had done before them, filled up the void by those 



iv.] THE CEOSS AND THE CRESCENT. 109 

daemonologies, images, base Fetish, worships, which 
made the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and 
I believe justly, as polytheists and idolaters, base as 
the pagan Arabs of the desert. 

I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been 
untrue to the teaching of Clement and his school, in 
that coarse and materialist admiration of celibacy 
which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic 
ferocity ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which 
taught them that in the person of the Incarnate Logos, 
that which was most divine had been proved to be 
most human, that which was most human had been 
proved to be most divine, ought surely to have given 
to them, as it has given to modern Europe, nobler, 
clearer, simpler views of the true relation of the sexes. 
However, on this matter they did not see their way. 
Perhaps, in so debased an age, so profligate a world, 
as that out of which Christianity had risen, it was 
impossible to see the true beauty and sanctity of those 
primary bonds of humanity. And while the relation 
of the sexes was looked on in a wrong light, all other 
social relations were necessarily also misconceived. 
" The very ideas of family and national life," as it has 
been said, " those two divine roots of the Church, 
severed from which she is certain to wither away into 
that most cruel and most godless of spectres, a religious 
world, had perished in the East, from the evil influence 
of the universal practice of slave-holding, as well as 
from the degradation of that Jewish nation which had 
been for ages the great witness for these ideas ; and 
all classes, like their forefather Adam — like, indeed, 
the Old Adam — the selfish, cowardly, brute nature in 
every man and in every age — were shifting the blame 
of sin from their own consciences to human relationships 



110 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

and duties, and therein, to the God who had appointed 
them ; and saying, as of old, c The woman whom Thou 
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I 
did eat/ " 

Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, 
by asserting her moral and spiritual equality with the 
man, there seems to have been no suspicion that she 
was the true complement of the man, not merely by 
softening him, but by strengthening him; that true 
manhood can be no more developed without the in- 
fluence of the woman, than true womanhood without 
the influence of the man. There is no trace among the 
Egyptian celibates of that chivalrous woman-worship 
which our Gothic forefathers brought with them into 
the West, which shed a softening and ennobling light 
round the mediaeval convent life, and warded off for 
centuries the worst effects of monasticism. Among 
the religious of Egypt, the monk regarded the nun, 
the nun the monk, with dread and aversion; while 
both looked on the married population of the opposite 
sex with a coarse contempt and disgust which is hardly 
credible, did not the foul records of it stand written 
to this day, in HoSweyde's extraordinary ' ' Vitae Patrum 
Eremiticorum ;" no barren school of metaphysic, truly, 
for those who are philosophic enough to believe that 
all phenomena whatsoever of the human mind are 
worthy matter for scientific induction. 

And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of 
such vastness that it was said to equal in number the 
laity. This produced, no doubt, an enormous increase 
in the actual amount of moral evil. But it produced 
three other effects, which were the ruin of Alexandria. 
Eirst, a continually growing enervation and numerical 
decrease of the population ; next, a carelessness of, and 



iv.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. Ill 

contempt for social and political life ; and lastly, a 
most brutalising effect on the lay population; who, 
told that they were, and believing themselves to be, 
beings of a lower order, and living by a lower standard, 
sank down more and more generation after generation. 
They were of the world, and the ways of the world 
they must follow. Political life had no inherent sanctity 
or nobleness ; why act holily and nobly in it ? Family 
life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act 
holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy, 
noble, and divine principle or ground for it ? And 
thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium, a 
chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, 
in the home and the market, in the theatre and the 
senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or 
since ; a chaos which reached its culmination in the 
seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, 
perhaps the two most hideous sovereigns, worshipped 
by the most hideous empire of parasites and hypocrites, 
cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the long- 
suffering of a righteous God. 

But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. 
In the year 640 the Alexandrians were tearing each 
other in pieces about some Jacobite and Melchite con- 
troversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant, 
because the fighters on both sides seem to have lost 
(as all parties do in their old age) the knowledge of 
what they were fighting for, and to have so bewildered 
the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, 
as to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous con- 
temporary war between the blue and green factions at 
Constantinople, which began by backing in the theatre, 
the charioteers who drove in blue dresses, against those 
who drove in green ; then went on to identify them- 



112 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

selves eacli with one of the prevailing theological 
factions ; gradually developed, the one into an aristo- 
cratic, the other into a democratic, religious party; and 
ended by a civil war in the streets of Constantinople, 
accompanied by the most horrible excesses, which had 
nearly, at one time, given up the city to the flames, 
and driven Justinian from his throne. 

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite con- 
troversies and riots, appeared before the city the 
armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab tribes. 
A short and fruitless struggle followed ; and, strange 
to say, a few months swept away from the face of the 
earth, not only the wealth, the commerce, the castles, 
and the liberty, but the philosophy and the Christianity 
of Alexandria ; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, 
all that had been built up by Alexander and the 
Ptolemies, by Clement and the philosophers, and made 
void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of human 
toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary 
Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the 
Mussulman invaders. The Christian remnant became 
tributaries ; and Alexandria dwindled, from that time 
forth, into a petty seaport town. 

And now — can we pass over this new metaphysical 
school of Alexandria ? Can we help inquiring in what 
the strength of Islamism lay ? I, at least, cannot. 
I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in 
what relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to 
the Alexandrian speculations of five hundred years, 
and how it had power to sweep those speculations 
utterly from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult 
problem; to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful 
problem. What more awful historic problem, than to 
see the lower creed destroying the higher ? to see God,, 



IV.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 113 

as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him 
that He had made man ? Awful indeed : but I can 
honestly say, that it is one from the investigation of 
which I have learnt — I cannot yet tell how much : and 
of this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian 
philosophy, I should not have been able to do justice 
to Islam -, without Islam I should not have been able 
to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-living 
and practical element. 

I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from 
your minds the vulgar notion that Mohammed was in 
anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver, pretending 
to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do. 
He sinned in one instance : but, as far as I can see, 
only in that one — I mean against what he must have 
known to be right. I allude to his relaxing in his 
own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he 
had proclaimed. And yet, even in this case, the desire 
for a child may have been the true cause of his 
weakness. He did not see the whole truth, of course : 
but he was an infinitely better man than the men 
around : perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of 
his day. Many here may have read Mr. Carlyle's 
vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on Hero 
"Worship ; to those who have not, I shall only say, that 
I entreat them to do so ; and that I assure them, that 
though I differ in many things utterly from Mr. Carlyle's 
inferences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I am 
convinced, from my own acquaintance with the original 
facts and documents, that the picture there drawn of 
Mohammed is a true and a just description of -a much- 
calumniated man. 

Now, what was the strength of Islam ? The common 
answer is, fanaticism and enthusiasm. To such answers 
vol. i. — H. e. i 



114 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

I can only rejoin : Such terms must be denned before 
they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and 
enthusiasm are. Till then I have no more a 'priori 
respect for a long word ending in -ism or -asm than I 
have for one ending in -ation or -ality. But while 
fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined — a work 
more difficult than is commonly fancied — we will go on 
to consider another answer. We are told that the 
strength of Islam lay in the hope of their sensuous 
Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so, 
this is the first and last time in the world's history that 
the strength of any large body of people — perhaps of 
any single man — lay in such a hope. History gives us 
innumerable proofs that such merely selfish motives 
are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and 
conceit, of pious frauds, often of the most devilish 
cruelty : but, as far as my reading extends, of nothing 
better. Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the 
same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans ; and 
similar causes should produce similar effects : but those 
hopes gave them no strength. Besides, according to 
the Mussulmans' own account, this was not their great 
inspiring idea ; and it is absurd to consider the wild 
battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black- 
eyed and green-kerchiefed Houris calling to them from 
the skies, as representing the average feelings of a 
generation of sober and self-restraining men, who 
showed themselves actuated by far higher motives. 

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that 
the Mussulmans were strong, because they believed 
what they said ; and the Greeks weak, because they 
did not believe what they said. From this notion I 
shall appeal to another doctrine of the very same men 
who put it forth, and ask them, Can any man be strong 



iv.J THE CEOSS AND THE CKESCENT. lis 

by believing a lie ? Have you not told us, nobly 
enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed 
to death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be 
shattered to atoms the moment you try to use it, to bring 
it into rude actual contact with fact, and Nature, and 
the eternal laws ? Faith to be strong, must be faith 
in something which is not one's self ; faith in some- 
thing eternal, something objective, something true, 
which would exist just as much though we and all the 
world disbelieved it. The strength of belief comes 
from that which is believed in ; if you separate it 
from that, it becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation 
of positiveness ; and what sort of strength that will 
give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the 'Jews 
who opposed Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter 
the Penniless to the Crusades, of the Munster Ana- 
baptists, and many another sad page of human folly. 
It may give the fury of idiots ; not the deliberate 
might of valiant men. Let us pass this by, then; 
believing that faith can only give strength where it is 
faith in something true and right : and go on to 
another answer almost as popular as the last. 

We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain 
innate force and savage virtue of the Arab character. If 
we have discovered this in the followers of Mohammed, 
they certainly had not discovered it in themselves. They 
spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who 
had received a divine light, and that light a moral 
light, to teach them to love that which was good, 
and refuse that which was evil ; and to that divine 
light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every 
right action of their lives. Most noble and affecting, 
in my eyes, is that answer of Saad's aged envoy to 
Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him 

i 2 



116 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

with, the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs. 
" Whatsoever thou hast said/'' answered the old man, 
" regarding the former condition of the Arabs is true. 
Their food was green lizards ; they buried their infant 
daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead 
carcases, and drank blood; while others slew their 
kinsfolk, and thought themselves great and valiant, 
when by so doing they became possessed of more 
property. They were clothed with hair garments, 
they knew not good from evil, and made no dis- 
tinction between that which was lawful and unlawful. 
Such was our state ; but God in his mercy has sent 
us, by a holy prophet, a sacred volume, which teaches 
us the true faith." 

These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam. 
They are a just comment on that short and rugged 
chapter of the Koran which is said to have been Moham- 
med's first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when, 
after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, 
under the glorious eastern stars, he came down and 
told his good Kadijah that he had found a great thing, 
and that she must help him to write it down. And 
what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel- 
driver so priceless a treasure ? Not merely that God 
was one God — vast as that discovery was — but that 
he was a God u who showeth to man the thing which 
he knew not; " a, " most merciful God; " a God, in a 
word, who could be trusted ; a God who would teach 
and strengthen; a God, as he said, who would give him 
courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an 
answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen 
cavilled and sneered at his message to them, to turn from 
their idols of wood and stone, and, become righteous 
men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous. 



[v.] THE CKOSS AND THE CRESCENT. 117 

" A God who showeth to man the thing which he 
knew not. ;J That idea gave might to Islam, because it 
was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result of a true 
insight into the character of God. And that idea alone, 
believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, 
philosophy, or heart of man. Each will be strong, 
each will endure, in proportion as it believes that God 
is one who shows to man the thing which he knew not : 
as it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint 
John wrote, that He was the light who lightens every 
man who comes into the world. 

In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more 
or less clearly, that end and object of all metaphysic 
whereof I have already spoken so often ; that external 
and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old ; 
and had seen that its name was righteousness, and that 
it dwelt absolutely in an absolutely righteous person ; 
and moreover, that this person was no careless self- 
contented epicurean deity ; but that He was, as they 
loved to call Him, the most merciful God ; that He cared 
for men ; that He desired to make men righteous. Of 
that they could not doubt. The fact was palpable, 
historic, present. To them the degraded Koreish of 
the desert, who as they believed, and I think believed 
rightly, had fallen from the old Monotheism of their 
forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the lowest 
fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and 
wretchedness — to them, while they were making idols 
of wood and stone; eating dead carcases ; and burying 
their daughters alive ; careless of chastity, of justice, 
of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in tres- 
passes and sins ; hateful and hating one another — a 
man, one of their own people had come, saying: "I 
have a message from the one righteous God. His curse 



118 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He -will have 
you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather 
Abraham. Be that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, 
out of your savagery and brutishness. Then you shall 
be able to trample under foot the profligate idolaters, 
to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which they 
have been oppressing for centuries, and to recover the 
East for its rightful heirs, the children of Abraham." 
Was this not, in every sense, a message from God ? I 
must deny the philosophy of Clement and Augustine, 
I must deny my own cou science, my own reason, 
I must outrage my own moral sense, and confess 
that I have no immutable standard of right, that I 
know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to 
have been one ; if I deny what seems to me the palpable 
historic fact, that those wild Koreish had in them a 
reason and a conscience, which could awaken to that 
message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its bound- 
less importance, and that they did accept that message, 
and lived by it in proportion as they received it fully, 
such lives as no men in those times, and few in after 
times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I do feel, 
that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were 
better men than I am, I must throw away all that 
Philo — all that a Higher authority — has taught me : or 
I must attribute their lofty virtues to the one source 
of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and 
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish. 

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most 
patent and complete failures upon earth, if the true 
test of a system's success be the gradual progress and 
amelioration of the human beings who are under its 
influence ? First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy ? 
I do not judge Mohammed for having allowed it. He 



iv.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 119 

found it one of the ancestral and immemorial customs 
of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew 
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his 
ideal man; and, as he believed, the divinely-inspired 
ancestor of his race. It seemed to him that what was 
right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab. 
God shall judge him, not I. Moreover, the Christians 
of the East, divided into either monks or profligates ; 
and with far lower and more brutal notions of the 
married state than were to be found in Arab poetry 
and legend, were the very last men on earth to make 
him feel the eternal and divine beauty of that pure 
wedded love which Christianity has not only pro- 
claimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated 
woman from her old slavery to the stronger sex. And 
I believe, from his chivalrous faithfulness to his good 
wife Kadij ah, as long as she lived, that Mohammed 
was a man who could have accepted that great truth 
in all its fulness, had he but been taught it. He 
certainly felt the evil of polygamy so strongly as to 
restrict it in every possible way, except the only right 
way — namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of 
marriage. But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you 
will, was a deflection from the right law, from the 
true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged 
itself. That chivalrous respect for woman, which 
was so strong in the early Mohammedans, died out. 
The women themselves — who, in the first few years 
of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their 
helpmates, counsellors, and fellow-warriors — degen- 
erated rapidly into mere playthings. I need not 
enter into the painful subject of woman's present 
position in the East, and the social consequences 
thereof. Bat I firmly believe, not merely as a theory, 



120 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

but as a fact which may be proved by abundant 
evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine- 
tenths of the present decay and old age of every 
Mussulman nation ; and that till it be utterly abolished, 
all Western civilisation and capital, and all the civil 
and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot 
toward their revival. You must regenerate the family 
before you can regenerate the nation, and the relation 
of husband and wife before the family; because, as 
long as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt 
also. 

But there is another cause of the failure of 
Islamism, more intimately connected with those meta- 
physical questions which we have been hitherto 
principally considering. 

Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there 
was generally the most intense belief in each man 
that he was personally under a divine guide and 
teacher. But their creed contained nothing which 
could keep up that belief in the minds of succeeding 
generations. They had destroyed the good with the 
evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguish- 
ing wrath. In sweeping away the idolatries and 
fetish worships of the Syrian Catholics, the Mussul- 
mans had swept away also that doctrine which alone 
can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships 
— if not outward and material ones, yet the still more 
subtle, and therefore more dangerous idolatries of 
the intellect. For they had swept away the belief 
in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human 
soul, who was, in some mysterious way, the pattern 
and antitype of human virtue and wisdom. And 
more, they had swept away that belief in the incarna- 
tion of the Logos, which alone can make man feel 



iv.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 121 

that his divine teacher is one who can enter into the 
human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human spirit. 
And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal 
friends were dead, the belief in a present divine 
teacher, on the whole, died with them ; and the 
Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of 
Him of whom the Koran spoke. They began to 
worship the book — which after all is not a book, but 
only an irregular collection of Mohammed's medita- 
tions, and notes for sermons — with the most slavish 
and ridiculous idolatry. They fell into a cabbalism, 
and a superstitious reverence for the mere letters and 
words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the 
old Eabbis was moderate and rational. They sur- 
rounded it, and the history of Mohammed, with all 
ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying wonders, 
whereof the book itself contained not a word; and 
which Mohammed, during his existence, had denied 
and repudiated, saying that he worked no miracles, 
and that none were needed ; because only reason was 
required to show a man the hand of a good God in all 
human affairs. Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans 
found the miracles necessary to confirm their faith : 
and why ? Because they had lost the sense of a 
present God, a God of order; and therefore hankered, 
as men in such a mood always will, after prodigious 
and unnatural proofs of His having been once present 
with their founder Mohammed. 

And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipo- 
tent Being whom Mohammed, arising out of his great 
darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish, 
receded in the minds of their descendants to an 
unapproachable and abysmal distance. For they had 
lost the sense of His present guidance, His personal 



122 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

care. They had lost all which could connect Him 
with the working of their own souls, with their 
human duties and struggles, with the belief that His 
mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy 
and human love ; in plain English, that He was loving 
and merciful at all. The change came very gradually, 
thank God ; you may read of noble sayings and deeds 
here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed : 
but it came ; and then their belief in God's omni- 
potence and absoluteness dwindled into the most 
dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His 
unchangeableness became in their minds not an un- 
changeable purpose to teach, forgive, and deliver 
men — as it seemed to Mohammed to have been — but 
a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to 
have His own way, whatsoever that way might be. 
That dark fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay 
of the Mohammedan nations. It has made them 
careless of self -improvement ; faithless of the possi- 
bility of progress ; and has kept, and will keep, the 
Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual matters, whole 
ages behind the Christian nations of the West. 

How far the story of Omar's commanding the 
baths of Alexandria to be heated with the books from 
the great library is true, we shall never know. Some 
have doubted the story altogether : but so many fresh 
corroborations of it are said to have been lately 
discovered, in Arabic writers, that I can hardly doubt 
that it had some foundation in fact. One cannot but 
believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexan- 
drian grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou 
the gift of the library, took care to save some, at least, 
of its treasures; and howsoever strongly Omar may 
have felt or said that all books which agreed with 



iv.] THE CEOSS AND THE CRESCENT. 123 

the Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with 
it only fit to be destroyed, the general feeling of the 
Mohammedan leaders was very different. As they 
settled in the various countries which they conquered, 
education seems to have been considered by them an 
important object. We even find some of them, in the 
same generation as Mohammed, obeying strictly the 
Prophet's command to send all captive children to 
school — a fact which speaks as well for the Mussul- 
mans' good sense, as it speaks ill for the state of 
education among the degraded descendants of the 
Greek conquerors of the East. Gradually philosophic 
Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova ; 
and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on 
Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste Syntaxis — 
which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, 
by which it was so long known during the Middle 
Ages. 

But they did little but comment, though there 
was no Neoplatonic or mystic element in their com- 
mentaries. It seems as if Alexandria was preordained, 
by its very central position, to be the city of com- 
mentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, 
that Philoponus, who may be considered as the man 
who first introduced the simple warriors of the 
Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems to 
have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist 
eclecticism. He maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, 
Proclus, and the rest, had entirely misunderstood 
Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him with 
Plato, or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. 
Aristotle was henceforth the text-book of Arab savants. 
It was natural enough. The Mussulman mind was 
trained in habits of absolute obedience to the authority 



124 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

of fixed dogmas. All those attempts to follow out 
rnetaphysic to its highest object, theology, would be 
useless if not wrong in the eyes of a Mussulman, who 
had already his simple and sharply- defined creed on 
all matters relating to the unseen world. With him 
metaphysic was a study altogether divorced from 
man's higher life and aspirations. So also were 
physics. What need had he of Cosmogonies ? what 
need to trace the relations between man and the 
universe, or the universe and its Maker ? He had his 
definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the only 
ultimate relation between man and the universe; his 
dogma of an absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once 
for all, as the only relation between the universe and 
its Maker : and further it was not lawful to speculate. 
The idea which I believe unites both physic and meta- 
physic with man's highest inspirations and widest 
speculations — the Alexandria idea of the Logos, of 
the Deity working in time and space by successive 
thoughts — he had not heard of ; for it was dead, as I 
have said, in Alexandria itself ; and if he had heard 
of it, he would have spurned it as detracting from the 
absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom he 
so nobly yet so partially bore witness. So it was to 
be ; doubtless it was right that it should be so. 
Man's eye is too narrow to see a whole truth, his brain 
too weak to carry a whole truth. Better for him, and 
better for the world, is perhaps the method on which 
man has been educated in every age, by which to each 
school, or party, or nation, is given some one great 
truth, which they are to work out to its highest 
development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some 
happier age — perhaps, alas ! only some future state — 
to reconcile that too favoured dogma with other truths 



iv.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 125 

which lie beside it, and without which it is always 
incomplete, and sometimes altogether barren. 

But such schools of science, founded on such a 
ground as this, on the mere instinct of curiosity, had little 
chance of originality or vitality. All the great schools 
of the world, the elder Greek philosophy, the Alexan- 
drian, the present Baconian school of physics, have had 
a deeper motive for their search, a far higher object 
which they hope to discover. But indeed, the Mus- 
sulmans did not so much wish to discover truth, as to 
cultivate their own intellects. For that purpose a 
sharp and subtle systematist, like Aristotle, was the 
very man whom they required ; and from the destruc- 
tion of Alexandria may date the rise of the Aristotelian 
philosophy. Translations of his works were made into 
Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac 
translations ; the former of which had been made 
during the sixth and seventh centuries, by the wreck 
of the Neoplatonist party, during their visit to the 
philosophic Chozroos. A century after, they filled 
Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alras- 
chid, and their successors, who patronised the Nes- 
torian Christians, obtained from them translations 
of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek 
works; while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, 
had introduced the same literary taste into SpaiD, 
where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes and Mai- 
monides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had 
flourished at Bagdad a century before. 

But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to 
have invented nothiDg; they only commented. And 
yet not only commented ; for they preserved for us 
those works of whose real value they were so little 
aware. Averroes, in quality of commentator on Aris- 



126 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lecT. 

totle, became his rival in the minds of the mediaeval 
schoolmen ; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on 
Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text- 
book of all European physicians ; while Albatani and 
Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on Ptolemy, 
not however without making a few important additions 
to his knowledge ; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third 
inequality of the moon's motion, in addition to the 
two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did, according 
to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner — 
an apparently solitary instance, and one which, in its 
own day, had no effect; for the fact was forgotten, 
and rediscovered centuries after by Tycho Brahe. To 
Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable heir- 
looms. The one is the use of the sine, or half- chord of 
the double arc, instead of the chord of the arc itself, 
which had been employed by the Greek astronomers ; 
the other, of even more practical benefit, was the 
introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead 
of the troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the 
Greeks. These ten digits, however, seem, says Pro- 
fessor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians 
themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no 
exception to the sterility of the Arabian genius in 
scientific inventions. Nevertheless we are bound, in 
all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the 
Arabs Professor De Morgan's opinion of the Moslem, 
in his article on Euclid : " Some writers speak 
slightingly of this progress, the results of which they 
are too apt ■ to compare with those of our own time. 
They ought rather to place the Saracens by the side 
of their own Gothic ancestors ; and making some 
allowance for the more advantageous circumstances 
under which the first started, they should view the 



IV.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 127 

second systematically dispersing the remains of Greek 
civilisation, while the first were concentrating the 
geometry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and algebra of 
India, and the astronomy of both, to form a nucleus 
for the present state of science." 

To this article of Professor De Morgan's on Euclid,* 
and to Professor WhewelFs excellent ' c History of the 
Inductive Sciences," from which I, being neither Arabic 
scholar nor astronomer, have drawn most of my facts 
about physical science, I must refer those who wish 
to know more of the early rise of physics, and of their 
preservation by the Arabs, till a great and unexpected 
event brought them back again to the quarter of the 
globe where they had their birth, and where alone 
they could be regenerated into a new and practical 
life. 

That great event was the Crusades. We have 
heard little of Alexandria lately. Its intellectual 
glory had departed westward and eastward, to Cordova 
and to Bagdad ; its commercial greatness had left it 
for Cairo and Damietta. But Egypt was still the 
centre of communication between the two great 
stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. 
Lane has shown in his most valuable translation of the 
"Arabian Nights," possessed a peculiar life and 
character of its own. 

It was the rash object of the Crusaders to ex- 
tinguish that life. Palestine was their first point of 
attack : but the later Crusaders seem to have found, 
like the rest of the world, that the destinies of 
Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt ; 
and to Damietta, accordingly, was directed that last 

* Smith's " Classical Dictionary." 



128 ALEXANDRIA AND HEE SCHOOLS. [lect. 

disastrous attempt of St. Louis, which all may read so 
graphically described in the pages of Joinville. 

The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which 
they aimed. They succeeded in an object of which 
they never dreamed ; for in those Crusades the Moslem 
and the Christian had met face to face, and found 
that both were men, that they had a common humanity, 
a common eternal standard of nobleness and virtue. 
So the Christian knights went home humbler and 
wiser men, when they found in the Saracen emirs the 
same generosity, truth, mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, 
which they had fancied their own peculiar possession, 
and added to that, a civilisation and a learning which 
they could only admire and imitate. And thus, from 
the era of the Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprang up 
between the Crescent and the Cross, till it was again 
broken by the fearful invasions of the Turks throughout 
Eastern Europe. The learning of the Moslem, as well 
as their commerce, began to pour rapidly into Christen- 
dom, both from Spain, Egypt, and Syria ; and thus 
the Crusaders were, indeed, rewarded according to 
their deeds. They had fancied that they were bound 
to vindicate the possession of the earth for Him to 
whom they believed the earth belonged. He showed 
them — or rather He has shown us, their children— 
that He can vindicate His own dominion better far than 
man can do it for Him ; and their cruel and unjust aim 
was utterly foiled. That was not the way to make 
men know or obey Him. They took the sword, and 
perished by the sword. But the truly noble element 
in them — the element which our hearts and reasons 
recognise and love, in spite of all the loud words about 
the folly and fanaticism of the Crusades, whensoever 
we read " The Talisman" or "Ivanhoe" — the element 



iv.] THE CKOSS AND THE CEESCENT. 129 

of loyal faith and self-sacrifice — did not go unrequited. 
They learnt wider, juster views of man and virtue, 
which I cannot help believing must have had great 
effect in weakening in their minds their old, exclusive, 
and bigoted notions, and in paving the way for the 
great outburst of free thought, and the great assertion 
of the dignity of humanity, which the fifteenth century 
beheld. They opened a path for that influx of 
scientific knowledge which has produced, in after 
centuries, the most enormous effects on the welfare 
of Europe, and made life possible for millions who 
would otherwise have been pent within the narrow 
bounds of Europe, to devour each other in the struggle 
for room and bread. 

But those Arabic translations of Greek authors 
were a fatal gift for Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift 
for Bagdad. In that Almagest of Ptolemy, in that 
Organon of Aristotle, which the Crusaders are said to 
have brought home, lay, rude and embryotic, the 
germs of that physical science, that geographical 
knowledge which has opened to the European the 
commerce and the colonisation of the globe. Within 
three hundred years after his works reached Europe, 
Ptolemy had taught the Portuguese to sail round 
Africa ; and from that day the stream of eastern 
wealth flowed no longer through the Red Sea, or the 
Persian Gulf, on its way to the new countries of the 
West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and 
Bagdad, dwindled down to their present insignificance. 
And yet the whirligig of time brings about its revenges. 
The stream of commerce is now rapidly turning back 
to its old channel ; and British science bids fair to 
make Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations. 

It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the 
vol. i. — H. E. K 



130 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect. 

huge possibilities of her future. Her own physical 
capacities, as the great mind of Napoleon saw, are 
what they always have been, inexhaustible; and 
science has learnt to set at naught the only defect of 
situation which has ever injured her prosperity, 
namely, the short land passage from the Nile to the 
Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever 
bound up with her fate; and a British or French 
colony might, holding the two countries, develop itself 
into a nation as vast as sprang from Alexander's 
handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting 
point for the nations of the West and those great 
Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem destined to spring up 
in the Australian ocean. Wide as the dream may 
appear, steam has made it a far narrower one than the 
old actual fact, that for centuries the Phoenician and 
the Arabian interchanged at Alexandria the produce 
of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And as 
for intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, 
as she has always wanted, that insular and exclusive 
position which seems almost necessary to develop 
original thought and original national life, yet she may 
still act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and 
polities, and the young and buoyant vigour of the 
new-born nations may at once teach, and learn from, 
the prudence, the experience, the traditional wisdom 
of the ancient Europeans. 

This vision, however possible, may be a far-off 
one : but the first step towards it, at least, is being 
laid before our eyes — and that is, a fresh reconciliation 
between the Orescent and the Cross. Apart from all 
political considerations, which would be out of place 
here, I hail, as a student of philosophy, the school 
which is now, both in Alexandria and in Constanti- 



iv.] THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT. 131 

nople, teaching to Moslem and to Christians the same 
lesson which the Crusaders learnt in Egypt five 
hundred years ago. A few years' more perseverance 
in the valiant and righteous course which. Britain has 
now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field 
for capital and enterprise, for the introduction of civil 
and religious liberty among the down-trodden peasantry 
of Egypt; as the Giaour becomes an object of respect, 
and trust, and gratitude to the Moslem ; and as the 
feeling that Moslem and Giaour own a common 
humanity, a common eternal standard of justice and 
mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our 
promises, and to succour the oppressed, shall have 
taken place of the old brute wonder at our careless 
audacity, and awkward assertion of power, which now 
expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed Alexan- 
drian compliment — "There is one Satan, and there 
are many Satans : but there is no Satan like a Frank 
in a round hat."" 

It would be both, uncourteous and unfair of me to 
close these my hasty Lectures, without expressing my 
hearty thanks for the great courtesy and kindness 
which I have received in this my first visit to your 
most noble and beautiful city; and often, I am proud 
to say, from those who differ from me deeply on many 
important points ; and also for the attention with which 
I have been listened to while trying, clumsily enough, 
to explain dry and repulsive subjects, and to express 
opinions which may be new, and perhaps startling, to 
many of my hearers. If my imperfect hints shall 
have stirred up but one hearer to investigate this 
obscure and yet most important subject, and to 
examine for himself the original documents, I shall 

k 2 



132 ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS. [lect.it. 

feel that my words in this place have not been spoken 
in vain; for even if such a seeker should arrive at 
conclusions different from my own (and I pretend to 
no infallibility), he will at least have learnt new 
facts, the parents of new thought, perhaps of new 
action ; he will have come face to face with new 
human beings, in whom he will have been compelled 
to take a human interest ; and will surely rise from 
his researches, let them lead him where they will, at 
least somewhat of a wider-minded and a wider-hearted 
man. 



THE ANCIEN REGIME. 



THE ANCIEN REGIME. 



PEEFACE. 

The rules of the Royal Institution forbid (and wisely) 
religious or political controversy. It was therefore 
impossible for me in these Lectures, to say much which 
had to be said, in drawing a just and complete picture 
of the Ancien Regime in France. The passages 
inserted between brackets, which bear on religious 
matters, were accordingly not spoken at the Royal 
Institution. 

But more. It was impossible for me in these 
Lectures, to bring forward as fully as I could have 
wished, the contrast between the continental nations 
and England, whether now, or during the eighteenth 
century. But that contrast cannot be too carefully 
studied at the present moment. In proportion as it is 
seen and understood, will the fear of revolution (if such 
exists) die out among the wealthier classes ; and the 
wish for it (if such exists) among the poorer ; and a 
large extension of the suffrage will be looked on as — 
what it actually is — a safe and harmless concession to 



136 THE ANCIEK EEGIME. 

the wishes — and, as I hold, to the just rights — of a 
large portion of the British nation. 

There exists in Britain now, as far as I can see, no 
one of those evils which brought about the French 
Revolution. There is no widespread misery, and 
therefore no widespread discontent, among the classes 
who live by hand-labour. The legislation of the last 
generation has been steadily in favour of the poor, as 
against the rich ; and it is even more true now than 
it was in 1789, that — as Arthur Young told the French 
mob which stopped his carriage — the rich pay many 
taxes (over and above the poor-rates, a direct tax on 
the capitalist in favour of the labourer) more than are 
paid by the poor. "In England >} (says M. de Tocque- 
ville of even the eighteenth century) " the poor man 
enjoyed the privilege of exemption from taxation ; in 
France, the rich. - " Equality before the law is as well- 
nigh complete as it can be, where some are rich and 
others poor; and the only privileged class, it some- 
times seems to me, is the pauper, who has neither 
the responsibility of self-government, nor the toil of 
self-support. 

A minority of malcontents, some justly, some 
unjustly, angry with the present state of things, will 
always exist in this world. But a majority of mal- 
contents we shall never have, as long as the workmen 
are allowed to keep untouched and unthreatened their 
rights of free speech, free public meeting, free combi- 
nation for all purposes which do not provoke a breach 
of the peace. There may be (and probably are) to be 
found in London and the large towns, some of those 
revolutionary propagandists who have terrified and 
tormented continental statesmen since the year 1815. 
But they are far fewer in number than in 1848; far 



PREFACE. 137 

fewer still (I believe) than in 1831; and their habits, 
notions, temper, whole mental organisation, is so 
utterly alien to that of the average Englishman, that 
it is only the sense of wrong which can make him take 
counsel with them, or make common cause with them. 
Meanwhile, every man who is admitted to a vote, is 
one more person withdrawn from the temptation to 
disloyalty, and enlisted in maintaining the powers that 
be — when they are in the wrong, as well as when they 
are in the right. For every Englishman is by his 
nature conservative; slow to form an opinion; cautious 
in putting it into effect; patient under evils which seem 
irremediable ; persevering in abolishing such as seem 
remediable ; and then only too ready to acquiesce in 
the earliest practical result; to "rest and be thankful." 
His faults, as well as his virtues, make him anti- 
revolutionary. He is generally too dull to take in a 
great idea ; and if he does take it in, often too selfish 
to apply it to any interest save his own. But now and 
then, when the sense of actual injury forces upon him 
a great idea, like that of Free-trade or of Parliamentary 
Reform, he is indomitable, however slow and patient, 
in translating his thought into fact : and they will not 
be wise statesmen who resist his dogged determination. 
If at this moment he demands an extension of the 
suffrage eagerly and even violently, the wise statesman 
will give at once, gracefully and generously, what the 
Englishman will certainly obtain one day, if he has set 
his mind upon it. If, on the other hand, he asks for 
it calmly, then the wise statesman (instead of mistaking 
English reticence for apathy) will listen to his wishes 
all the more readily ; seeing in the moderation of the 
demand, the best possible guarantee for moderation in 
the use of the thing demanded. 



138 THE ANC.IEN REGIME. 

And, be it always remembered, that in introducing 
these men into the <( balance of the Constitution/' we 
introduce no unknown quantity. Statesmen ought to 
know them, if they know themselves ; to judge what 
the working man would do by what they do themselves. 
He who imputes virtues to his own class imputes them 
also to the labouring class. He who imputes vices to 
the labouring class, imputes them to his own class. 
For both are not only of the same flesh and blood, but, 
what is infinitely more important, of the same spirit ; 
of the same race ; in innumerable cases, of the same 
ancestors. For centuries past the most able of these 
men have been working upwards into the middle 
class, and through it, often, to the highest dignities, 
and the highest family connections ; and the whole 
nation knows how they have comported themselves 
therein. And, by a reverse process (of which the 
physiognomist and genealogist can give abundant 
proof), the weaker members of that class which was 
dominant during the Middle Age have been sinking 
downward, often to the rank of mere day-labourers, 
and carrying downward with them — sometimes in a 
very tragical and pathetic fashion — somewhat of the 
dignity and the refinement which they had learnt from 
their ancestors. 

Thus has the English nation (and as far as I can 
see, the Scotch likewise) become more homogeneous 
than any nation of the Continent, if we except France 
since the extermination of the Frankish nobility. And 
for that very reason, as it seems to me, it is more 
fitted than any other European nation for the exercise 
of equal political rights ; and not to be debarred of 
them by arguments drawn from countries which have 
been governed — as England has not been — by a caste. 



PREFACE. 139 

The civilisation, not of mere book-learning, but of 
the heart ; all that was once meant by " manners " — 
good breeding, high, feeling, respect for self and 
respect for others — are just as common (as far as I 
have seen) among the hand-workers of England and 
Scotland, as among any other class ; the only difference 
is, that these qualities develop more early in the richer 
classes, owing to that severe discipline of our public 
schools, which makes mere lads often fit to govern, 
because they have learnt to obey : while they develop 
later — generally not till middle age — in the classes who 
have not gone through in their youth that Spartan 
training, and who indeed (from a mistaken conception 
of liberty) would not endure it for a day. This and 
other social drawbacks which are but too patent, retard 
the manhood of the working classes. That it should 
be so, is a wrong. For if a citizen have one right 
above all others to demand anything of his country, 
it is that he should be educated; that whatever 
capabilities he may have in him, however small, should 
have their fair and full chance of development. But 
the cause of the wrong is not the existence of a caste, 
or a privileged class, or of anything save the plain fact, 
that some men will be always able to pay more for 
their children's education than others; and that those 
children will, inevitably, win in the struggle of life. 

Meanwhile, in this fact is to be found the most 
weighty, if not the only argument against manhood 
suffrage, which would admit many — but too many, 
alas ! — who are still mere boys in mind. To a reason- 
able household suffrage it cannot apply. The man 
who (being almost certainly married, and having 
children) can afford to rent a £5 tenement in a town, 
or in the country either, has seen quite enough of life, 



140 THE ANCIEN E^GIME. 

and learnt quite enough of it, to form a very fair 
judgment of the man who offers to represent him in 
Parliament ; because he has learnt, not merely some- 
thing of his own interest, or that of his class, but — 
what is infinitely more important — the difference 
between the pretender and the honest man. 

The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar 
to Britain, must be sought far back in the ages. It 
would seem that the distinction between " earl and 
cKurl " (the noble and the non-noble freeman) was 
crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests 
— that of the Anglo-Saxon nobility by Sweyn and 
Canute ; and that of the Anglo-Danish nobility by 
William and his Frenchmen. Those two terrible 
calamities, following each other in the short space of 
fifty years, seem to have welded together, by a com- 
munity of suffering, all ranks and races, at least south 
of the Tweed; and when the English rose after the 
storm, they rose as one homogeneous people, never to 
be governed again by an originally alien race. The 
English nobility were, from the time of Magna Charta, 
rather an official nobility, than, as in most continental 
countries, a separate caste ; and whatever caste 
tendencies had developed themselves before the Wars 
of the Roses (as such are certain to do during centuries 
of continued wealth and power), were crushed out by 
the great revolutionary events of the next hundred 
years. Especially did the discovery of the New World, 
the maritime struggle with Spain, the outburst of 
commerce and colonisation during the reigns of 
Elizabeth and James, help toward this good result. 
It was in vain for the Lord Oxford of the day, sneering 
at Raleigh's sudden elevation, to complain that as on 
the virginals, so in the State, " Jacks went up, and 



PEEFACE. HI 

heads went down." The proudest noblemen were not 
ashamed to have their ventures on the high seas, and 
to send their younger sons trading, or buccaneering, 
under the conduct of low-born men like Drake, who 
"would like to see the gentleman that would not set 
his hand to a rope, and hale and draw with the 
mariners. " Thus sprang up that respect for, even 
fondness for, severe bodily labour, which the educated 
class of no nation save our own has ever felt ; and 
which has stood them in such good stead, whether at 
home or abroad. Thus, too, sprang up the system of 
society by which (as the ballad sets forth) the squire's 
son might be a " 'prentice good," and marry 

" The bailiff's daughter dear 
That dwelt at Islington," 

without tarnishing, as he would have done on the 
Continent, the scutcheon of his ancestors. That which 
has saved England from a central despotism, such as 
crushed, during the eighteenth century, every nation 
on the Continent, is the very same peculiarity which 
makes the advent of the masses to a share in political 
power safe and harmless ; namely, the absence of 
caste, or rather (for there is sure to be a moral fact 
underlying and causing every political fact) the 
absence of that wicked pride which perpetuates caste ; 
forbidding those to intermarry whom nature and fact 
pronounce to be fit mates before God and man. 

These views are not mine only. They have been 
already set forth so much more forcibly by M. de 
Tocqueville, that I should have thought it unnecessary 
to talk about them, were not the rhetorical phrases, 
" Caste," " Privileged Classes," " Aristocratic Ex- 
clusiveness," and such-like, bandied about again just 



142 THE ANCIEN REGIME. 

now, as if they represented facts. If there remain in 
this kingdom any facts which correspond to those words, 
let them be abolished as speedily as possible : but that 
snch do remain was not the opinion of the master of 
modern political philosophy, M. de Tocqueville. 

He expresses his snrprise " that the fact which 
distinguishes England from all other modern nations, 
and which alone can throw light on her peculiarities, 
. . . has not attracted more attention, . . . and 
that habit has rendered it, as it were, imperceptible 
to the English themselves — that England was the only 
country in which the system of caste had been not only 
modified, but effectually destroyed. The nobility and 
the middle classes followed the same business, embraced 
the same professions, and, what is far more significant, 
intermarried with each other. The daughter of the 
greatest nobleman" (and this, if true of the eighteenth 
century, has become far more true of the nineteenth) 
" could already, without disgrace, marry a man of 
yesterday." . . . 

"It has often been remarked that the English 
nobility has been more prudent, more able, and less 
exclusive than any other. It would have been much 
nearer the truth to say, that in England, for a very 
long time past, no nobility, properly so called, have 
existed, if we take the word in the ancient and limited 
sense it has everywhere else retained." . . . 

"For several centuries the word e gentleman ' " (he 
might have added, "burgess") "has altogether changed 
its meaning in England ; and the word ' roturier ' has 
ceased to exist. In each succeeding century it is 
applied to persons placed somewhat lower in the social 
scale " (as the "bagman" of Pickwick has become, 
and has deserved to become, the " commercial gentle- 



PREFACE. 143 

man " of our day). " At length it travelled with the 
English to America, where it is used to designate 
every citizen indiscriminately. Its history is that of 
democracy itself." . . . 

"If the middle classes of England, instead of 
making war upon the aristocracy, have remained so 
intimately connected with it, it is not especially because 
the aristocracy is open to all, but rather, because its 
outline was indistinct, and its limit unknown : not 
so much because any man might be admitted into it, 
as because it was impossible to say with certainty 
when he took rank there : so that all who approached 
it might look on themselves as belonging to it ; might 
take part in its rule, and derive either lustre or profit 
from its influence. " 

Just so ; and therefore the middle classes of Britain, 
of whatever their special political party, are conservative 
in the best sense of that word. 

For there are not three, but only two, classes in 
England ; namely, rich and poor : those who live by 
capital (from the wealthiest landlord to the smallest 
village shopkeeper) ; and those who live by hand- 
labour. Whether the division between those two 
classes is increasing or not, is a very serious question. 
Continued legislation in favour of the hand-labourer, 
and a beneficence towards him, when in need, such as 
no other nation on earth has ever shown, have done 
much to abolish the moral division. But the social 
division has surely been increased during the last half 
century, by the inevitable tendency, both in commerce 
and agriculture, to employ one large capital, where 
several small ones would have been employed a century 
ago. The large manufactory, the large shop, the large 
estate, the large farm, swallows up the small ones. 



141 THE ANCIEN REGIME. 

The yeornan, tlie thrifty squatter who could work at 
two or three trades as well as till his patch of moor, 
the hand-loom weaver, the skilled village craftsman, 
have all but disappeared. The handworker, finding it 
more and more difficult to invest his savings, has been 
more and more tempted to squander them. To rise to 
the dignity of a capitalist, however small, was growing 
impossible to him, till the rise of that co-operative 
movement, which will do more than any social or 
political impulse in our day for the safety of English 
society, and the loyalty of the English working- 
classes. And meanwhile — ere that movement shall 
have spread throughout the length and breadth of the 
land, and have been applied, as it surely will be some 
day, not only to distribution, not only to manufacture, 
but to agriculture likewise — till then, the best judges 
of the working men's worth must be their employers ; 
and especially the employers of the northern manu- 
facturing population. What their judgment is, is 
sufficiently notorious. Those who depend most on the 
working men, who have the best opportunities of 
knowing them, trust them most thoroughly. As long- 
as great manufacturers stand forward as the political 
sponsors of their own workmen, it behoves those who 
cannot have had their experience, to consider their 
opinion as conclusive. As for that " influence of the 
higher classes " which is said to be endangered just 
now ; it will exist, just as much as it deserves to exist. 
Any man who is superior to the many, whether in 
talents, education, refinement, wealth, or anything 
else, will always be able to influence a number of men 
— and if he thinks it worth his while, of votes — by 
just and lawful means. And as for unjust and 
unlawful means, let those who prefer them keep up 



PREFACE, 145 

heart. The world will go on much as it did before ; 
and be always quite bad enough to allow bribery 
and corruption, jobbery and nepotism, quackery and 
arrogance, their full influence over our home and 
foreign policy. An extension of the suffrage, however 
wide, will not bring about the millennium. It will 
merely make a large number of Englishmen contented 
and loyal, instead of discontented and disloyal. It 
may make, too, the educated and wealthy classes wiser 
by awakening a wholesome fear — perhaps, it may be, 
by awakening a chivalrous emulation. It may put the 
younger men of the present aristocracy upon their 
mettle, and stir them up to prove that they are not in 
the same effete condition as was the French noblesse 
in 1789. It may lead them to take the warnings which 
have been addressed to them, for the last thirty years, 
by their truest friends — often by kinsmen of their own. 
It may lead them to ask themselves why, in a world 
which is governed by a just God, such great power as 
is palpably theirs at present is entrusted to them, save 
that they may do more work, and not less, than other 
men, under the penalties pronounced against those to 
whom much is given, and of whom much is required. 
It may lead them to discover that they are in a world 
where it is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the 
ripe fruit drop into your mouth ; where the ' ( competi- 
tion of species " works with ruthless energy among all 
ranks of being, from kings upon their thrones to the 
weeds upon the waste ; where " he that is not hammer, 
is sure to be anvil ; " and he who will not work, 
neither shall he eat. It may lead them to devote that 
energy (in which they surpass so far the continental 
aristocracies) to something better than outdoor amuse- 
ments or indoor dilettantisms. There are those 
vol. i. — u. E. l 



146 THE ANCIEN EEGIME. 

among them who, like one section of the old French 
noblesse, content themselves with mere complaints of 
" the revolutionary tendencies of the age/'' Let them 
beware in time ; for when the many are on the march, 
the few who stand still are certain to be walked over. 
There are those among them who, like another section 
of the French noblesse, are ready, more generously 
than wisely, to throw away their own social and 
political advantages, and play (for it will never be 
really more than playing) at democracy. Let them, 
too, beware. The penknife and the axe should respect 
each other; for they were wrought from the same 
steel : but the penknife will not be wise in trying to 
fell trees. Let them accept their own position, not in 
conceit and arrogance, but in fear and trembling ; and 
see if they cannot play the man therein, and save their 
own class; and with it, much which it has needed 
many centuries to accumulate and to organise, and 
without which no nation has yet existed for a single 
century. They are no more like the old French 
noblesse, than are the commercial class like the old 
French bourgeoisie, or the labouring like the old 
French peasantry. Let them prove that fact by their 
deeds during the next generation ; or sink into the 
condition of mere rich men, exciting', by their luxury 
and laziness, nothing but envy and contempt. 

Meanwhile, behind all classes and social forces — I 
had almost said, above them all- — stands a fourth 
estate, which will, ultimately, decide the form which 
English society is to take : a Press as different from 
the literary class of the Ancien Regime as is every- 
thing else English; and different in this — that it is 
free. 

The French Revolution, like every revolution (it 



PREFACE. 147 

seems to rue) which, has convulsed the nations of 
Europe for the last eighty years, was caused immediately 
— whatever may have been its more remote causes — 
by the suppression of thought; or, at least, by a sense 
of wrong among those who thought. A country where 
every man, be he fool or wise, is free to speak that 
which is in him, can never suffer a revolution. The 
folly blows itself off like steam, in harmless noise ; the 
wisdom becomes part of the general intellectual stock 
of the nation, and prepares men for gradual, and 
therefore for harmless, change. 

As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed 
against sudden and capricious folly, either from above 
or from below. As long as the press is free, a nation 
is guaranteed against the worse evil of persistent and 
obstinate folly, cloaking itself under the venerable 
shapes of tradition and authority. For under a free 
press, a nation must ultimately be guided not by a 
caste, not by a class, not by mere wealth, not by the 
passions of a mob : but by mind ; by the net result of 
all the common-sense of its members ; and in the 
present default of genius, which is un-common sense, 
common-sense seems to be the only, if not the best, 
safeguard for poor humanity. 



1867. 



L 2 



LECTURE I. 

Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867. 
CASTE. 

These Lectures are meant to be comments on the 
state of France before the French Revolution. To 
English society, past or present, I do not refer. For 
reasons which I have set forth at length in an in- 
troductory discourse, there never was any Ancien 
Regime in England. 

Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in 
England a system which might have led to a political 
condition like that of the Continent, all classes com- 
bined and exterminated them ; while the course of 
English society went on as before. 

On the contrary, England was the mother of every 
movement which undermined, and at last destroyed, 
the Ancien Regime. 

From England went forth those political theories 
which, transmitted from America to France, became 
the principles of the French Revolution. From 
England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all 
its immense results. It is noteworthy, that when 
Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a certain famous 
passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the 



lect. i.] CASTE. 149 

world — of the ten names to whom he does honour, 
seven names are English. " It is," he says, "neither 
Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza, nor 
Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor 
Mr. Toland, nor Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried 
the torch of discord into their countries ." It is worth 
notice, that not only are the majority of these names 
English, but that they belong not to the latter but to 
the former half of the eighteenth century ; and indeed, 
to the latter half of the seventeenth. 

So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, 
which helped more than all to break up the superstitions 
of the Ancien Regime, and to set man face to face 
with the facts of the universe. From England, towards 
the end of the seventeenth century, it was promulgated 
by such men as Newton, Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and 
the first founders of our Royal Society. 

In England, too, arose the great religious move- 
ments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — 
and especially that of a body which I can never 
mention without most deep respect — the Society of 
Friends. At a time when the greater part of the 
Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these men were 
reasserting doctrines concerning man, and his relation 
to his Creator, which, whether or not all believe them 
(as I believe them) to be founded on eternal fact, all 
must confess to have been of incalculable benefit to 
the cause of humanity and civilisation. 

From England, finally, about the middle of the 
eighteenth century, went forth — promulgated by 
English noblemen — that freemasonry which seems to 
have been the true parent of all the secret societies of 
Europe. Of this curious question, more hereafter. 
But enough has been said to show that England; 



150 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

instead of falling, at any period, into the stagnation 
of the Ancien Regime, was, from the middle of the 
seventeenth century, in a state of intellectual growth 
and ferment which communicated itself finally to the 
continental nations. This is the special honour of 
England; universally confessed at the time. It was 
to England that the slowly-awakening nations looked, 
as the source of all which was noble, true, and free, in 
the dawning future. 

It will be seen, from what I have said, that I 
consider the Ancien Regime to begin in the seventeenth 
century. I should date its commencement — as far as 
that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed 
anarchic, can be defined — from the end of the Thirty 
Years' War, and the peace of Westphalia in 1648. 

For by that time the mighty spiritual straggles 
and fierce religious animosities of the preceding century 
had worn themselves out. And, as always happens, 
to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of 
weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions 
for which so much blood had been shed. No man 
had come out of the battle with altogether clean 
hands ; some not without changing sides more than 
once. The war had ended as one, not of nations, not 
even of zealots, but of mercenaries. The body of 
Europe had been pulled in pieces between them all ; 
and the poor soul thereof — as was to be expected — had 
fled out through the gaping wounds. Life, mere 
existence, was the most pressing need. If men could 
— in the old prophet's words — find the life of their 
hand, they were content. High and low only asked 
to be let live. The poor asked it — slaughtered on a 
hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home : 
vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert ; 



i.] CASTE. 151 

the population was diminished for several generations. 
The trading classes, ruined by the long war, only 
asked to be let live, and make a little money. The 
nobility, too, only asked to be let live. They had 
lost, in the long struggle, not only often lands and 
power, but their ablest and bravest men; and a 
weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do 
the governing of the world. Let them live, and keep 
what they had. If signs of vigour still appeared in 
France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, 
factitious, temporary — soon, as the event proved, to 
droop into the general exhaustion. If wars were still 
to be waged they were to be wars of succession, wars 
of diplomacy ; not wars of principle, waged for the 
mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion 
was general; and to it we must attribute alike the 
changes and the conservatism of the Ancien Regime. 
To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism, 
and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville 
has set forth in a book which I shall have occasion 
often to quote. To it is owing, too, that longing, 
which seems to us childish, after ancient forms, 
etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplo- 
matic, legal, ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to 
keepsakes of the past — revered relics of more in- 
telligible and better-ordered times. If the spirit had 
been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that 
was all the more reason for keeping up the letter. 
They had had a meaning once, a life once; perhaps there 
was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry 
bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, 
and stand upon their feet. At least it was useful that 
the common people should so believe. There was 
good hope that the simple masses, seeiDg the old 



152 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

dignities and formalities still parading the streets, 
should suppose that they still contained men, and were 
not mere wooden figures^ dressed artistically in official 
costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not 
deceived. More than a century of bitter experience 
was needed ere the masses discovered that their ancient 
rulers were like the suits of armour in the Tower of 
London — empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and 
armed with lances which every ploughboy could wrest 
out of their hands, and use in his own behalf. 

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For 
those suits of armour had once held living men ; 
strong, brave, wise ; men of an admirable temper ; 
doing their work according to their light, not alto- 
gether well — what man does that on earth? — but 
well enough to make themselves necessary to, and 
loyally followed by, the masses whom they ruled. 
No one can read fairly the " Gesta Dei per Francos in 
Oriente," or the deeds of the French Nobility in their 
wars with England, or those tales — however legendary 
— of the mediaeval knights, which form so noble an 
element in German literature, without seeing, that 
however black were these men's occasional crimes, 
they were a truly noble race, the old Nobility of the 
Continent ; a race which ruled simply because, without 
them, there would have been naught but anarchy and 
barbarism. To their chivalrous ideal they were too 
often, perhaps for the most part, untrue : but, partial 
and defective as it is, it is an ideal such as never 
entered into the mind of Celt or Gaul, Hun or Sclav ; 
one which seems continuous with the spread of the 
Teutonic conquerors. They ruled because they did 
practically raise the ideal of humanity in the countries 
which they conquered, a whole stage higher. They 



i.] CASTE. 153 

ceased to rule when they were, through their own sins, 
caught up and surpassed in the race of progress by 
the classes below them. 

But, even when at its best, their system of govern- 
ment had in it — like all human invention — original 
sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element, which 
was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and 
ruin. The old Nobility of Europe was not a mere 
aristocracy. It was a caste : a race not intermarrying 
with the races below it. It was not a mere aristocracy. 
For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all 
societies strive, or profess to strive. And such a true 
aristocracy may exist independent of caste, or the 
hereditary principle at all. We may conceive an 
Utopia, governed by an aristocracy which should be 
really democratic; which should use, under developed 
forms, that method which made the mediaeval priest- 
hood the one great democratic institution of old 
Christendom ; bringing to the surface and utilising 
the talents and virtues of all classes, even to the 
lowest. We may conceive an aristocracy choosing 
out, and gladly receiving into its own ranks as equals, 
every youth, every maiden, who was distinguished by 
intellect, virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to 
rank or birth ; and rejecting in turn, from its own 
ranks, each of its own children who fell below some 
lofty standard, and showed by weakiiness, dulness, or 
baseness, incapacity for the post of guiding and 
elevating their fellow-citizens. Thus would arise 
a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really 
most worthy — the most highly organised in body and 
in mind — perpetually recruited from below : from 
which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a few 
thousand years distant. 



154 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, 
did shudder, at such a notion. The supreme class was 
to keep itself pure, and avoid all taint of darker 
blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its 
most famous heroes had been born of such left-handed 
marriages as that of Robert of Normandy with the 
tanner's daughter of Falaise. te Some are so curious 
in this behalf/'' says quaint old Burton, writing about 
1650, "as these old Romans, our modern Venetians, 
Dutch, and French, that if two parties dearly love, 
the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not, by their 
laws, match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, 
education, and all good affection. In Germany, except 
they can prove their gentility by three descents, they 
scorn to match with them. A nobleman must marry 
a noblewoman ; a baron, a baron's daughter ; a knight, 
a knight's. As slaters sort their slates, do they 
degrees and families." 

And doubtless this theory — like all which have 
held their ground for many centuries — at first repre- 
sented a fact. These castes were, at first, actually 
superior to the peoples over whom they ruled. I 
cannot, as long as my eyes are open, yield to the 
modern theory of the equality — indeed of the non- 
existence — of races. Holding, as I do, the primaeval 
uuity of the human race, I see in that race the same 
inclination to sport into fresh varieties, the same 
competition of species between those varieties, which 
Mr. Darwin has pointed out among plants and mere 
animals. A distinguished man arises ; from him a 
distinguished family; from it a distinguished tribe, 
stronger, cunninger than those around. It asserts its 
supremacy over its neighbours at first exactly as a 
plant or animal would do, by destroying, and., where 



I.] CASTE. 155 

possible,, eating them ; next, having grown more 
prudent, by enslaving them ; next, having gained a 
little morality in addition to its prudence, by civilising 
them, raising them more or less toward its own 
standard. And thus, in every land, civilisation and 
national life has arisen out of the patriarchal state ; 
and the Eastern scheik, with his wives, free and slave, 
and his hundreds of fighting men born in his house, 
is the type of all primaeval rulers. He is the best 
man of his horde — in every sense of the word best ; 
and whether he have a right to rule them or not, they 
consider that he has, and are the better men for his 
guidance. 

Whether this ought to have been the history of 
primaeval civilisation, is a question not to be deter- 
mined here. That it is the history thereof, is surely 
patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what 
must have been. In the first place, the strongest and 
cunningest savage must have had the chance of pro- 
ducing children more strong and cunning than the 
average; he would have — the strongest savage has 
still — the power of obtaining a wife, or wives, superior 
in beauty and in household skill, which involves 
superiority of intellect; and therefore his children 
would — some of them at least — be superior to the 
average, both from the father's and the mother's 
capacities. They again would marry select wives ; 
and their children again would do the same ; till, in a 
very few generations, a family would have established 
itself, considerably superior to the rest of the tribe in 
body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race. 

Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, 
a new mode of tillage, or aught else which gave him 
power, that would add to the superiority of his whole 



156 THE ANOIBN EEGIME. [lect. 

family. For the invention would be jealously kept 
among them as a mystery, a hereditary secret. To 
this simple cause, surely, is to be referred the system 
of hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt or 
Hindoostan. To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek 
and in Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not 
merely as the best warrior and best minstrel, but as 
the best smith, armourer, and handicraftsman of his 
tribe. If, however, the inventor happened to be a 
low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to 
the ruling race. For nothing could be more natural 
or more easy — as more than one legend intimates — 
than that the king should extort the new secret from 
his subject, and then put him to death to prevent any 
further publicity. 

Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly 
through the abysses of the past, both of whom must 
have become in their time great chiefs, founders of 
mighty aristocracies — it may be, worshipped after 
their death as gods. 

The first, who seems to have existed after the age 
in which the black race colonised Australia, must have 
been surely a man worthy to hold rank with our 
Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented 
(and mind, one man must have invented the thing first, 
and by the very nature of it, invented it all at once) 
an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike any- 
thing to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not 
been called, like the plough, the olive, or the vine, a 
gift of the immortal gods : and yet an instrument so 
simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all 
races in Europe and America, and no substitute could 
be found for it till the latter part of the fifteenth 
century. Yes, a great genius was he, and the conse- 



i.] CASTE. 157 

quent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering 
race, who first invented for himself and his children 
after him a — bow and arrow. 

The next — whether before or after the first in 
time, it suits me to speak of him in second place — was 
the man who was the potential ancestor of the whole 
Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe ; 
the man who first, finding a foal upon the steppe, 
deserted by its dam, brought it home, and reared 
it ; and then bethought him of the happy notion of 
making it draw — presumably by its tail — a fashion 
which endured long in Ireland, and had to be for- 
bidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth 
century. A great aristocrat must that man have 
become. A greater still he who first substituted 
the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first 
thought of wheels. A greater still he who con- 
ceived the yoke and pole for bearing up his chariot; 
for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot, became 
the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who 
mightily oppressed the children of Israel, for he 
had nine hundred chariots of iron. Egyptians, 
Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans — none of them 
improved on the form of the conquering biga, till 
it was given up by a race who preferred a pair of 
shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to ride 
instead of drive. A great aristocrat, again, must he 
have been among those latter races who first conceived 
the notion of getting on his horse's back, accommo- 
dating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a 
centaur, half-man, half-horse. That invention must 
have tended, in the first instance, as surely toward 
democracy as did the invention of firearms. A tribe 
of riders must have been always, more or less, equal 



158 THE AXCIEN EEGIUE. £lec?. 

and free. Equal because a man on a horse would feel 
himself a man indeed ; because the art of riding called 
out an independence, a self-help, a skill, a conscious- 
ness of power, a personal pride and vanity, which 
would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders 
might be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. 
They could never become glebce adscripti, bound to 
the soil, as long as they could take horse and saddle, 
and away. History gives us more than one glimpse 
of such tribes — the scourge and terror of the non- 
riding races with whom they came in contact. Some, 
doubtless, remember how in the wars between Alfred 
and the Danes, "the array" (the Scandinavian 
invaders) again and again horse themselves, steal away 
by night from the Saxon infantry, and ride over the 
land (whether in England or in France), " doing 
unspeakable evil." To that special instinct of horse- 
manship, which still distinguishes their descendants, 
we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian settlement 
of the north and east of England. Some, too, may 
recollect the sketch of the primaeval Hun, as he first 
appeared to the astonished and disgusted old Roman 
soldier Ammianus Marcellinus ; the visages ' ' more like 
cakes than faces ; " the <( figures like those which are 
hewn out with an axe on the poles at bridge-ends;" 
the rat-skin coats, which they wore till they rotted off 
their limbs ; their steaks of meat cooked between the 
saddle and the thigh; the little horses on which 
"they eat and drink, buy and sell, and sleep lying 
forward along his narrow neck, and indulging in every 
variety of dream." And over and above, and more 
important politically, the common councils "held on 
horseback, under the authority of no king, but content 
with the irregular government of nobles, under whose 



i.] CASTE. 159 

leading they force their way through all obstacles." 
A race — like those Cossacks who are probably their 
lineal descendants — to be feared, to be hired, to be 
petted, but not to be conquered. 

Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we 
have in our own English borderers, among whom (as 
Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-servants 
had but to snatch their arms and spring into their 
saddles and they became at once the Northern Horse, 
famed as the finest light cavalry in the world. And 
equal to them — superior even, if we recollect that they 
preserved their country's freedom for centuries against 
the superior force of England — were those troops of 
Scots who, century after century, swept across the 
border on their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal 
hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon 
to bake it ; careless of weather and of danger ; men 
too swift to be exterminated, too independent to be 
enslaved. 

But if horsemanship had, in these cases, a levelling 
tendency it would have the very opposite when a 
ridiDg tribe conquered a non-riding one. The 
conquerors would, as much as possible, keep the art 
and mystery of horsemanship hereditary among them- 
selves, and become a Ritterschaft or chivalrous caste. 
And they would be able to do so : because the 
conquered race would not care or dare to learn the 
new and dangerous art. There are persons, even in 
England, who can never learn to ride. There 
are whole populations in Europe, even now, when 
races have become almost indistinguishably mixed, 
who seem unable to learn. And this must have 
been still more the case when the races were more 
strongly separated in blood and habits. So the 



160 THE ANCIEN EEGIME. [lect. 

Teutonic chief, with his gesitha, cornites, or select 
band of knights, who had received from him, as 
Tacitus has it, the war-horse and the lance, established 
himself as the natural ruler — and oppressor — of the 
non-riding populations ; first over the aborigines of 
Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been 
enslaved, and their names lost, before the time of 
Tacitus; and then over the non-riding Romans and 
Gauls to the South and "West, and the Wendish and 
Sclavonic tribes to the East. Very few in numbers, 
but mighty in their unequalled capacity of body and 
mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic 
Ritterschaft literally rode roughshod over the old 
world ; never checked, but when they came in contact 
with the free-riding hordes of tie Eastern steppes; 
and so established an equestrian caste, of which the 
hnreZs of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been 
only hints ending in failure and absorption. 

Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. 
The favourite, and therefore the chosen sacrifice of 
Odin, their ancestor and God, the horse's flesh was 
eaten at the sacrificial meal ; the horse's head, hung 
on the ash in Odin's wood, gave forth oracular 
responses. As Christianity came in, and the eating 
of horse-flesh was forbidden as impiety by the Church, 
while his oracles dwindled down to such as that which 
Ealada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the 
German tale, the magic power of the horse figured 
only in ballads and legends : but his real power 
remained. 

The art of ridiug became an hereditary and ex- 
clusive science — at last a pedantry, hampered by absurd 
etiquettes, and worse than useless traditions ; but the 
power and right to ride remained on the whole the 



I.] CASTE. 161 

mark of tlie dominant caste. Terribly did they often 
abuse that special power. The faculty of making a 
horse carry him no more makes a man a good man, 
than the faculties of making money, making speeches, 
making books, or making a noise about public abuses. 
And of all ruffians, the worst, if history is to be trusted, 
is the ruffian on a horse ; to whose brutality of mind 
is superadded the brute power of his beast. A ruffian 
on a horse — what is there that he will not ride over, 
and ride on, careless and proud of his own shame ? 
When the ancient chivalry of France descended to 
that level, or rather delegated their functions to 
mercenaries of that level — when the knightly hosts 
who fought before Jerusalem allowed themselves to 
be superseded by the dragoons and dragonnades of 
Louis XIV. — then the end of the French chivalry 
was at hand, and came. But centuries before that 
shameful fall there had come in with Christianity the 
new thought, that domination meant responsibility; 
that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which 
denoted rank, came to denote likewise high moral 
excellencies. The nobilis, or man who was known, 
and therefore subject to public opinion, was bound to 
behave nobly. The gentleman — gentile-man — who 
respected his own gens, or family and pedigree, was 
bound to be gentle. The courtier, who had picked 
up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from 
Roman ecclesiastics, was bound to be courteous. He 
who held an " honour " or " edel ;; of land was bound 
to be honourable ; and he who held a ' ' weorthig/' 
or worthy, thereof, was bound himself to be worthy. 
In like wise, he who had the right to ride a horse, 
was expected to be chivalrous in all matters befitting 
the hereditary ruler, who owed a sacred debt to a 
vol. I. — h. e, M 



162 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

long line of forefathers, as well as to the state in 
which he dwelt; all dignity, courtesy, purity, self- 
restraint, devotion — such as they were understood in 
those rough days — centred themselves round the idea 
of the rider as the attributes of the man whose sup- 
posed duty, as well as his supposed right, was to 
govern his fellow-men, by example, as well as by law and 
force ; — attributes which gathered themselves up into 
that one word — Chivalry : an idea, which, perfect or 
imperfect, God forbid that mankind should ever forget, 
till it has become the possession — as it is the God- 
given right — of the poorest slave that ever trudged 
on foot ; and every collier-lad shall have become — as 
some of those Barnsley men proved but the other day 
they had become already : 

A very gentle perfect knight. 

Very unfaithful was chivalry to its ideal — as all men 
are to all ideals. But bear in mind, that if the horse 
was the symbol of the ruling caste, it was not at first 
its only strength. Unless that caste had had at first 
spiritual, as well as physical force on its side, it would 
have been soon destroyed — nay, it would have des- 
troyed itself — by internecine civil war. And we must 
believe that those Franks, Goths, Lombards, and 
Burgunds, who in the early Middle Age leaped on the 
backs (to use Mr. Carlyle's expression) of the Roman 
nations, were actually, in all senses of the word, better 
men than those whom they conquered. We must 
believe it from reason ; for if not, how could they, 
numerically few, have held for a year, much more for 
centuries, against millions, their dangerous elevation ? 
We must believe it, unless we take Tacitus's "Ger- 
mania," which I absolutely refuse to do, for a romance. 



i.] CASTE. 163 

We must believe that they were better than the 
Romanised nations whom they conquered, because the 
writers of those nations, Augustine, Salvian, and 
Sidonius Apollinaris, for example, say that they 
were such, and give proof thereof. Not good men 
according to our higher standard — far from it ; 
though Sidonius's picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, 
in his palace of Narbonne, is the picture of an 
eminently good and wise ruler. But not good, I say, 
as a rule — the Franks, alas ! often very bad men : 
but still better, wiser, abler, than those whom they 
ruled. "We must believe, too, that they were better, 
in every sense of the word, than those tribes on their 
eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after 
centuries, unless we discredit (which we have no 
reason to do) the accounts which the Roman and 
Greek writers give of the horrible savagery of those 
tribes. 

So it was in later centuries. One cannot read 
fairly the history of the Middle Ages without seeing 
that the robber knight of Germany or of France, who 
figures so much in modern novels, must have been 
the exception, and not the rule : that an aristo- 
cracy which lived by the saddle would have as little 
chance of perpetuating itself, as a priesthood composed 
of hypocrites and profligates ; that the mediaeval 
Nobility has been as much slandered as the niediasval 
Church; and the exceptions taken — as more salient 
and exciting — for the average : that side by side with 
ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest 
gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the best 
of their light, and were raising, and not depressing, 
the masses below them — one very important item in 
that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the 



164 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

country at their own expense, instead of leaving it to 
a standing army of mercenaries, at the beck and call 
of a despot ; and that, as M. de Tocqueville says : 
" In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty 
much as the government is regarded in our own ; the 
burdens they imposed were endured in consequence of 
the security they afforded. The nobles had many 
irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous 
rights : but they maintained public order, they ad- 
ministered justice, they caused the law to be executed, 
they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted 
the business of the community. In proportion as they 
ceased to do these things, the burden of their privileges 
appeared more oppressive, and their existence became 
an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do these 
things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as 
the period in which they ceased to do these things — 
in which they began to play the idlers, and expected 
to take their old wages without doing their old work. 

But in any case, government by a ruling caste, 
whether of the patriarchal or of the feudal kind, is 
no ideal or permanent state of society. So far from 
it, it is but the first or second step out of primaeval 
savagery. For the more a ruling race becomes con- 
scious of its own duty, and not merely of its own 
power — the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts 
as entrusted to it for the good of men — so much the 
more earnestly will it labour to raise the masses below 
to its own level, by imparting to them its own light ; 
and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by 
producing a general equality, moral and intellectual ; 
and fulfil that law of self-sacrifice which is the begin- 
ning and the end of all virtue. 

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make 



ij CASTE. 165 

all below them as noble as themselves — that is at least 
a fair ideal, tending toward, though it has not reached, 
the highest ideal of all. 

But suppose that the very opposite tendency — 
inherent in the heart of every child of man — should 
conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no longer the 
physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, 
but their equals. Suppose them — shameful, but not 
without example — actually sunk to be their inferiors. 
And that such a fall did come — nay, that it must have 
come — is matter of history. And its cause, like all 
social causes, was not a political nor a physical, but a 
moral cause. The profligacy of the French and Italian 
aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged itself 
on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered 
America) from which they never recovered. The 
Spanish aristocracy suffered, I doubt not very severely. 
The English and German, owing to the superior home- 
liness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at alh 
But the continental caste, instead of recruiting their 
tainted blood by healthy blood from below, did all, 
under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it tainted 
by continual intermarriage ; and paid, in increasing' 
weakness of body and mind, the penalty of their 
exclusive pride. It is impossible for anyone who reads 
the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the 
aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for ruin — yea, 
already ruined — under any form of government what- 
soever, independent of all political changes. Indeed, 
many of the political changes were not the causes but 
the effects of the demoralisation of the noblesse. 
Historians will tell you how, as early as the beginning 
of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained 



166 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [met. 

that the nobles were quitting their country districts ; 
how succeeding kings and statesmen, notably Richelieu 
and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up to Paris, 
that they might become mere courtiers, instead of 
powerful country gentlemen ; how those who remained 
behind were only the poor Iwbereaiix, little hobby- 
hawks among the gentry, who considered it degra- 
dation to help in governing the parish, as their fore- 
fathers had governed it, and lived shabbily in their 
chateaux, grinding the last farthing out of their 
tenants, that they might spend it in town during the 
winter. ~No wonder that with such an aristocracy, 
who had renounced that very duty of governing the 
country, for which alone they and their forefathers 
had existed, there arose government by intendants and 
sub- delegates, and all the other evils of administrative 
centralisation, which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and 
deplores. But what was the cause of the curse ? 
Their moral degradation. What drew them up to 
Paris save vanity and profligacy ? What kept them 
froni intermarrying with the middle class save pride ? 
What made them give up the office of governors save 
idleness ? And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idle- 
ness be not injustices and moral vices, what are ? 

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought 
under the walls of Jerusalem — who wrestled, and not 
in vain, for centuries with the equally heroic English, 
in defence of their native soil — who had set to all 
Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted 
down to this ; their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, 
being — a perfect readiness to fight duels. 

Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller- 
General out of the lower-born members of the Council 
of State ; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to 



I.] CASTE. 167 

make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of 
his greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a 
better man — abler, more energetic, and often, to 
judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more 
sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry — than 
was the count or marquis in the chateau above, who 
looked down on him. as a roturier; and let him never- 
theless become first his deputy, and then his master. 

Understand me — I am not speaking against the 
hereditary principle of the Ancien Regime, but against 
its caste principle — two widely different elements, 
continually confounded nowadays. 

The hereditary principle is good, because it is 
founded on fact and nature. If men's minds come 
into the world blank sheets of paper — which I much 
doubt — every other part and faculty of them comes in 
stamped with hereditary tendencies and peculiarities. 
There are such things as transmitted capabilities for 
good and for evil ; and as surely as the offspring of a 
good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the 
offspring of a good man, and still more of a good 
woman. If the parents have any special ability, their 
children will probably inherit it, at least in part ; and 
over and above, will have it developed in them by an 
education worthy of their parents and themselves. If 
man were — what he is not — a healthy and normal 
species, a permanent hereditary caste might go on 
intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself. But the 
same moral reason which would make such a caste 
dangerous — indeed, fatal to the liberty and develop- 
ment of mankind, makes it happily impossible. Crimes 
and follies are certain, after a few generations, to 
weaken the powers of any human caste ; and unless it 
supplements its own weakness by mingling again with 



168 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

the common stock of humanity, it must sink under 
that weakness, as the ancient noblesse sank by its 
own vice. Of course there were exceptions. The 
French Eevolution brought those exceptions out into 
strong light; and like every day of judgment, divided 
between the good and the evil. But it lies not in 
exceptions to save a caste, or an institution ; and a 
few Richelieus, Liancourts, Eochefoucaulds, Noailles, 
Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes 
involved in the wholesale doom due not to each indi- 
vidual, but to a system and a class. 

Profligacy, pride, idleness — these are the vices 
which we have to lay to the charge of the Teutonic 
Nobility of the Ancien Kegime in France especially ; 
and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole 
continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps 
the cause of them all,, lay another and deeper vice — 
godlessness — atheism. 

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal 
unbelief. I mean want of belief in duty, in responsi- 
bility. Want of belief that there was a living God 
governing the universe, who had set them their work, 
and would judge them according to their work. And 
therefore, want of belief, yea, utter unconsciousness, 
that they were set in their places to make the masses 
below them better men ; to impart to them their 
own civilisation, to raise them to their own level. 
They would have shrunk from that which I just now 
defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because 
it would have seemed to them madness to abolish 
themselves. But the process of abolition went on, 
nevertheless, only now from without instead of from 
within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a 
ruling class will not try to raise the masses to their own 



i.] CASTE. 169 

level, the masses will try to drag them down to theirs. 
That sense of justice which allowed privileges, when 
they were as strictly official privileges as the salary of 
a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House 
of Commons ; when they were earned, as in the 
Middle Age, by severe education, earnest labour, and 
life and death responsibility in peace and war, will 
demand the abolition of those privileges, when no 
work is done in return for them, with a voice which 
must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and justice. 

But with that righteous voice will mingle another, 
most wicked, and yet, alas ! most flattering to poor 
humanity — the voice of envy, simple and undisguised ; 
of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest 
of human passions ; which can never be justified, 
however hateful or unworthy be the envied man. 
And when a whole people, or even a majority thereof, 
shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will 
not do ? 

Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in 
the French Revolution of 1793, the noblest and the 
foulest characters labouring in concert, and side by 
side — often, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united 
in the same personage. The explanation is simple. 
Justice inspired the one; the other was the child of 
simple envy. But this passion of envy, if it becomes 
permanent and popular, may avenge itself, like all 
other sins. A nation may say to itself, " Provided 
we have no superiors to fall our pride, we are content. 
Liberty is a slight matter, provided we have equality. 
Let us be slaves, provided we are all slaves alike." 
It may destroy every standard of humanity above its 
own mean average ; it may forget that the old ruling 
class, in spite of all its defects and crimes, did at 



170 THE ANCIEN REGIME, [lkct. 

least pretend to represent something higher than 
man's necessary wants, plus the greed of amassing 
money; never meeting (at least in the country districts) 
any one wiser or more refined than an official or a 
priest drawn from the peasant class, it may lose the 
belief that any standard higher than that is needed ; 
and, all but forgetting the very existence of civilisa- 
tion, sink contented into a dead level of intellectual 
mediocrity and moral barbarism, crying, " Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

A nation in such a temper will surely be taken at 
its word. Where the carcase is, there the eagles will 
be gathered together ; and there will not be wanting 
to such nations — as there were not wanting in old 
Greece and Rome — despots who will give them all 
they want, and more, and say to them : " Yes, you 
shall eat and drink ; and yet you shall not die. For I, 
while I take care of your mortal bodies, will see that 
care is taken of your immortal souls/ ' 

For there are those who have discovered, with the 
kings of the Holy Alliance, that infidelity and scep- 
ticism are political mistakes, not so much because 
they promote vice, as because they promote (or are 
supposed to promote) free thought; who see that 
religion (no matter of what quality) is a most valuable 
assistant to the duties of a minister of police. They 
will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu's opinion 
that religion is a column necessary to sustain the social 
edifice ; they will quote, too, that sound and true say- 
ing of De TocquevihVs : * "If the first American who 
might be met, either in his own country, or abroad, 
were to be stopped and asked whether he considered 

* Mr. H. Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's " France before 
the Revolution of 1789." .p. 280. 



I.] CASTE. 171 

religion useful to the stability of the laws and the 
good order of society, he would answer, without hesi- 
tation, that no civilised society, but more especially 
none in a state of freedom, can exist without religion. 
Respect for religion is, in his eyes, the greatest 
guarantee of the stability of the State, and of the 
safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of 
the science of government, know that fact at least." 

M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, 
was lamenting that in France, "freedom was for- 
saken ;" " a, thing for which it is said that no one 
any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to 
me, perceive that, as in America the best guarantee of 
freedom is the reverence for a religion or religions, 
which are free themselves, and which teach men to 
be free ; so in other countries the best guarantee of 
slavery is, reverence for religions which are not free, 
and which teach men to be slaves. 

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there 
are others who will see ; who will say : <e If religion 
be the pillar of political and social order, there is an 
order which is best supported by a religion which is 
adverse to free thought, free speech, free conscience, 
free communion between man and Grod. The more 
enervating the superstition, the more exacting and 
tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, 
if we help it to do its own. If it permit us to enslave 
the body, we will permit it to enslave the soul." 

And so may be inaugurated a period of that 
organised anarchy of which the poet says : 

It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs. 



LECTURE IT. 



CENTRALISATION 



The degradation of the European nobility caused, of 
course, the increase of the kingly power, and opened 
the way to central despotisms. The bourgeoisie, the 
commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, 
its value, its real courage, were never able to stand 
alone against the kings. Their capital, being in- 
vested in trade, was necessarily subject to such sudden 
dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and 
so forth, that its holders, however individually brave, 
were timid as a class. They could never hold out on 
strike against the governments, and had to submit 
to the powers that were, whatever they were, under 
penalty of ruin. 

But on the Continent, and especially in France and 
Germany, unable to strengthen itself by intermarriage 
with the noblesse, they retained that timidity which is 
the fruit of the insecurity of trade ; and had to submit 
to a more and more centralised despotism, and grow 
up as they could, in the face of exasperating hind- 
rances to wealth, to education, to the possession, in 
many parts of France, of large landed estates ; leaving 



lect. ii.] CENTRALISATION. 173 

the noblesse to decay in isolated nselessness and weak- 
ness, and in many cases debt and poverty. 

The system — or rather anarchy — according to which 
France was governed during this transitional period, 
may be read in that work of M. de Tocqueville's 
which I have already quoted, and which is accessible 
to all classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent trans- 
lation. Every student of history is, of course, well 
acquainted with that book. But as there is reason to 
fear, from language which is becoming once more too 
common, both in speech and writing, that the general 
public either do not know it, or have not understood 
it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from it some- 
what largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact 
that M. de Tocqueville's book is founded on researches 
into the French Archives, which have been made (as 
far as I am aware) only by him; and contains in- 
numerable significant facts, which are to be found (as 
far as I am aware) in no other accessible work. 

The French people — says M. de Tocqueville — made, 
in 1 789, the greatest effort which was ever made by 
any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, 
and to separate by an abyss that which they had here- 
tofore been, from that which they sought to become 
hereafter. But he had long thought that they had 
succeeded in this singular attempt much less than was 
supposed abroad ; and less than they had at first 
supposed themselves. He was convinced that they 
had unconsciously retained, from the former state of 
society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even 
the opinions, by means of which they had effected the 
destruction of that state of things ; and that, without 
intending it, they had used its remains to rebuild the 
edifice of modern society. This is his thesis, and this 



174 THE ANCIEN REGIME, [lect. 

he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by docu- 
mentary evidence. Not only does lie find habits which 
we suppose — or supposed till lately — to have died with 
the eighteenth century, still living and working, at 
least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions 
which we look on usually as the special children of 
the nineteenth century, he shows to have been born 
in the eighteenth. France, he considers, is still at 
heart what the Ancien Regime made her. 

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the 
intense determination to gain and keep equality, even 
at the expense of liberty, had been long growing up, 
under those influences of which I spoke in my first 
lecture. 

He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a 
centralised administration; the expectation that the 
government should do everything for the people, and 
nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local 
liberties, local peculiarities ; the helplessness of the 
towns and the parishes : and all which issued in making- 
Paris France, and subjecting the whole of a vast 
country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots 
in the capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but 
of the Ancien Regime which preceded it ; and that 
Robespierre and his " Comite de Salut Public," and 
commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven 
in bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up 
and pull down, according to their wicked will, were 
only handling, somewhat more roughly, the same wires 
which had been handled for several generations by the 
Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their 
provincial intendants. 

"- Do you know," said Law to the Marquis 
d'Argenson, ft that this kingdom of France is governed 



n.] CENTRALISATION. 175 

by thirty intendants ? You have neither parliament, 
nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters 
of request, despatched into the provinces, that their 
evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, 
entirely depend." 

To do everything for the people, and let them do 
nothing for themselves — this was the Ancien Regime. 
To be more wise and more loving than Almighty God, 
who certainly does not do everything for the sous of 
men, but forces them to labour for themselves by 
bitter need, and after a most Spartan mode of 
education; who allows them to burn their hands as 
often as they are foolish enough to put them into the 
fire ; and to be filled with the fruits of their own folly, 
even though the folly be one of necessary ignorance ; 
treating them with that seeming neglect which is 
after all the most provident care, because by it alone 
can men be trained to experience, self-help, science, 
true humanity; and so become not tolerably harmless 
dolls, but men and women worthy of the name ; with 

The reason firm, the temperate will, 
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill ; 
The perfect spirit, nobly planned 
To cheer, to counsel, and command. 

Such seems to be the education and government 
appointed for man by the voluntatem Dei in rebus 
revelatum, and the education, therefore, which the 
man of science will accept and carry out. But the 
men of the Ancien Regime — in as far as it was a 
regime at all — tried to be wiser than the Almighty. 
Why not ? They were not the first, nor will be the 
last, by many who have made the same attempt. 
So this Council of State settled arbitrarily, not 
only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything 



176 THE ANCIEN EEGIHE. [lect. 

and everything'. Its members meddled, with their 
whole hearts and minds. They tried to teach agricul- 
ture by schools and pamphlets and prizes ; they sent 
out plans for every public work. A town could not 
establish an octroi, levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, 
farm, or administer their property, without an order 
in council. The Government ordered public rejoicings, 
saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses 
— in one case mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they 
fined a member of the burgher guard for absenting 
himself from a Te Deum. All self-government was 
gone. A country parish was, says Turgot, nothing 
but "an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as 
passive as the cabins they dwelt in. Without an 
order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple 
after a storm, or repair the parsonage gable. If they 
grumbled at the intendant, he threw some of the chief 
persons into prison, and made the parish pay the 
expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the 
arbitrary police of France. Everywhere was meddling. 
There were reports on statistics — circumstantial, in- 
accurate, and useless — as statistics are too often wont 
to be. Sometimes, when the people were starving, 
the Government sent down charitable donations to 
certain parishes, on condition that the inhabitants 
should raise a sum on their part. When the sum 
offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote 
on the margin, when he returned the report to the 
intendant, " Good — express satisfaction/' If it was 
more than sufficient, he wrote, " Good — express satis- 
faction and sensibility.'" There is nothing new under 
the sun. In 1761, the Government, jealous enough 
of newspapers, determined to start one for itself, and 
for that purpose took under its tutelage the Gazette 



II,] CENTRALISATION. 177 

de France. So the public newsmongers were of course 
to be the provincial intendants, and their sub-news- 
niongers, of course, the sub-delegates. 

But alas ! the poor sub-delegates seem to have 
found either very little news, or very little which it 
was politic to publish. One reports that a smuggler 
of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; 
another that a woman in his district has had three 
girls at a birth ; another that a dreadful storm has 
happened, but — has done no mischief; a fourth — living 
in some specially favoured Utopia — declares that in 
spite of all his efforts he has found nothing worth 
recording, but that he himself will subscribe to so 
useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons 
to follow his example : in spite of which loyal en- 
deavours, the journal seems to have proved a failure, 
to the great disgust of the king and his minister, 
who had of course expected to secure fine weather by 
nailing, like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand 
of the weather-glass. 

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this 
bureaucracy had stopped there. But, by a process of 
evocation (as it was called), more and more causes, 
criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the 
regular tribunals, to those of the intendants and the 
Council. Before the intendant all the lower order 
of people were generally sent for trial. Bread-riots 
were a common cause of such trials, and M. de 
Tocqueville asserts that he has found sentences^ 
delivered by the intendant, and a local council chosen 
by himself, by which men were condemned to the 
galleys, and even to death. Under such a system, 
under which an intendant must have felt it his interest 
to pretend at all risks, that all was going right, and 

vol. i. — n. E. N 



37S THE ANCIEN EEGIME. [leot. 

to regard any disturbance as a dangerous exposure 
of himself and his chiefs — one can understand easily 
enough that scene which Mr. Carlyle has dramatised 
from Lacretelle, concerning the canaille, the masses, 
as we used to call them a generation since : 

" A dumb generation — their voice only an inarti- 
culate cry. Spokesman, in the king's council, in the 
world's forum, they have none that finds credence. 
At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling 
down their hoes, and hammers ; and, to the astonish- 
ment of mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, 
aimless, get the length even of Versailles. Turgot is 
altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn 
laws ; there is dearth, real, or were it even factitious, 
an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the 
2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do 
here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretched- 
ness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, 
present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition 
of grievances. The chateau-gates must be shut ; but 
the king will appear on the balcony and speak to 
them. They have seen the king's face ; their petition 
of grievances has been, if not read, looked at. In 
answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows 
forty feet high, and the rest driven back to their dens 
for a time/' 

Of course. What more exasperating and inexpiable 
insult to the ruling powers was possible than this ? 
To persist in being needy and wretched, when a whole 
bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them 
prosperous and happy ? An insult only to be avenged 
in blood. Eemark meanwhile, that this centralised 
bureaucracy was a failure ; that after all the trouble 
taken to govern these masses^ they were not governed, 



II.] CENTEALISATION. 179 

in the sense of being made better, and not worse. The 
truth is, that no centralised bureaucracy, or so-called 
(C paternal government/' yet invented on earth, has 
been anything but a failure, or is it like to be any- 
thing else : because it is founded on an error ; because 
it regards and treats men as that which they are not, 
as things; and not as that which they are, as persons. 
If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with 
a hundred hands, helping the weak throughout the 
length and breadth of the empire, the system might 
be at least tolerable. But what if the Government 
were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a 
Hydra with a hundred heads and mouths, each far 
more intent on helping itself than on helping the 
people ? What if sub-delegates and other officials, 
holding office at the will of the intendant, had to live, 
and even provide against a rainy day ? What if inten- 
dants, holding office at the will of the Comptroller- 
General, had to do more than live, and found it 
prudent to realise as large a fortune as possible, not 
only against disgrace, but against success, and the 
dignity fit for a new member of the Noblesse de la 
Robe ? Would not the system, then, soon become 
intolerable ? Would there not be evil times for the 
masses, till they became something more than masses ? 

It is an ugly name, that of " The Masses/' for the 
great majority of human beings in a nation. He who 
uses it speaks of them not as human beings, but as 
things; and as things not bound together in one 
living body, but lying in a fortuitous heap. A swarm 
of ants is not a mass. It has a polity and a unity. 
Not the ants, but the fir-needles and sticks, of which, 
the ants have piled their nest, are a mass. 

The term, I believe, was invented during the 

v 2 



180 THE ANCIEN EEGIME. [lect. 

Ancien Regime. Whether it was or not, it expresses 
very accurately the life of the many in those days. 
No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of 
the masses of the United States ; for there every man 
is, or is presumed to be, a personage ; with his own 
independence, his own activities, his own rights and 
duties. No one, I believe, would have talked of the 
masses in the old feudal times ; for then each individual 
was someone's man, bound to his master by ties of 
mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base, but 
still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and 
dividing him from his class. 

Dividing, I say. The poor of the Middle Age had 
little sense of a common humanity. Those who owned 
allegiance to the lord in the next valley were not their 
brothers ; and at their own lord's bidding, they 
buckled on sword and slew the next lord's men, with 
joyful heart and good conscience. Only now and 
then misery compressed them into masses ; and they 
ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog. 
Some wholesale wrong made them aware that they 
were brothers, at least in the power of starving ; and 
they joined in the cry which was heard, I believe, in 
Mecklenburg as late as 1790 : " Den Edelman wille 
wi dodschlagen." Then, in Wat Tyler's insurrections, 
in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they proved 
themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking 
for awhile, by the mere weight of numbers, blows 
terrible, though aimless — soon to be dispersed and 
slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact 
aristocracy. Yet not always dispersed, if they could 
find a leader ; as the Polish nobles discovered to their 
cost in the middle of the seventeenth century. Then 
Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not without his 



ii.] CENTRALISATION. 181 

sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski and 
the Poles, found that the neighbouring noble's steward 
had taken a fancy to his windmill and his farm upon 
the Dnieper. He was thrown into prison on a frivolous 
charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his wife 
dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the 
flames, his eldest son scourged for protesting against 
the wrong. And he returned, at the head of an army 
of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free 
the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, 
throughout Podolia, Volhynia, Red Russia; to dese- 
crate the altars of God, and slay his servants ; to 
destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip 
noble ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death 
with the whips of his Cossacks ; and after defeating 
the nobles in battle after battle, to inaugurate an era 
of misery and anarchy from which Poland never 
recovered. 

Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, 
for one generation at least, that they were not many 
things, but one thing; a class, capable of brother- 
hood and unity, though, alas ! only of such as belongs 
to a pack of wolves. But such outbursts as this 
were rare exceptions. In general, feudalism kept 
the people divided, and therefore helpless. And as 
feudalism died out, and with it the personal self-respect 
and loyalty which were engendered by the old rela- 
tions of master and servant, the division still remained ; 
and the people, in France especially, became merely 
masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things 
intent on the necessaries of daily bread, like mites 
crawling over each other in a cheese. 

Out of this mass were struggling upwards per- 
petually, all who had a little ambition, a little scholar- 



182 THE ANCIEN REGIME, [lect. 

ship, or a little money, endeavouring to become mem- 
bers of the middle class by obtaining a Government 
appointment. "A man," says M. de Tocqueville, 
" endowed with some education and small means, 
thought it not decorous to die without having been a 
Government officer." " Every man, according to his 
condition," says a contemporary writer, - c wants to be 
something by command of the king." 

It was not merely the " natural vanity " of which 
M. de Tocqueville accuses his countrymen, which 
stirred up in them this eagerness after place ; for we 
see the same eagerness in other nations of the Con- 
tinent, who cannot be accused (as wholes) of that 
weakness. The fact is, a Government place, or a 
Government decoration, cross, ribbon, or what not, is, 
in a country where self-government is unknown or 
dead, the only method, save literary fame, which is 
left to men in order to assert themselves either to 
themselves or their fellow-men. 

A British or American shopkeeper or farmer asks 
nothing of his Government. He can, if he chooses, 
be elected to some local office (generally unsalaried) 
by the votes of his fellow- citizens. But that is his 
right, and adds nothing to his respectability. The 
test of that latter, in a country where all honest 
callings are equally honourable, is the amount of 
money he can make ; and a very sound practical test 
that is, in a country where intellect and capital are 
free. Beyond that, he is what he is, and wishes to be 
no more, save what he can make himself. He has his 
rights, guaranteed by law and public opinion ; and as 
long as he stands within them, and (as he well phrases 
it) behaves like a gentleman, he considers himself 
as good as any man ; and so he is. But under the 



ii.] CENTRALISATION. 183 

bureaucratic regime of the Continent, if a man had 
not " something by command of the king," he was 
nothing; and something he naturally wished to be, 
even by means of a Government which he disliked 
and despised. So in France, where innumerable petty 
posts were regular articles of sale, anyone, it seems, 
who had saved a little money, found it most profitable 
to invest it in a beadledom of some kind — to the great 
detriment of the country, for he thus withdrew his 
capital from trade ; but to his own clear gain, for he 
thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens, 
and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his 
taxes. The petty German princes, it seems, followed 
the example of France, and sold their little beadle- 
doms likewise ; but even where offices were not sold, 
they must be obtained by any and every means, by 
everyone who desired not to be as other men were, 
and to become Notables, as they were called in France ; 
so he migrated from the country into the nearest town, 
and became a member of some small body — guild, 
town council, or what not, bodies which were infinite 
in number. In one small town M. de Tocqueville 
discovers thirty-six such bodies, t( separated from each 
other by diminutive privileges, the least honourable 
of which was still a mark of honour." Quarrelling 
perpetually with each other for precedence, despising 
and oppressing the very menu jpeuple from whom they 
had for the most part sprung, these innumerable small 
bodies, instead of uniting their class, only served to 
split it up more and more ; and when the Revolution 
broke them up, once and for all, with all other pri- 
vileges whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and 
each man stood alone, proud of his individuality" 
- — his complete social isolation ; till he discovered that, 



184 THE ANCIEN EEGIME. [lect. 

in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also 
of fellows ; fulfilling, every man in his own person, 
the old fable of the bundle of sticks ; and had to 
submit, under the Consulate and the Empire, to a 
tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was freedom 
itself. 

For, in France at least, the Ancien Eegime was no 
tyranny. The middle and upper classes had individual 
liberty — it may be, only too much ; the liberty of 
disobeying a Government which they did not respect. 
" However submissive the French may have been 
before the Revolution to the will of the king, one sorb 
of obedience was altogether unknown to them. They 
knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate 
and contested power — a power but little honoured, 
frequently despised, but willingly endured because it 
may be serviceable, or because it may hurt. To that 
degrading form of servitude they were ever strangers. 
The king inspired them with feelings .... which 
have become incomprehensible to this generation. 
.... They loved him with the affection due to a 
father ; they revered him with the respect due to God. 
In submitting to the most arbitrary of his commands, 
they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty ; and 
thus they frequently preserved great freedom of mind, 
even in the most complete dependence. This liberty, 
irregular, intermittent," says M. de Tocqueville, 
" helped to form those vigorous characters, those 
proud and daring spirits, which were to make the 
French Revolution at once the object of the admiration 
and the terror of succeeding generations." 

This liberty — too much akin to anarchy, in which 
indeed it issued for awhile — seems to have asserted 
itself in continual petty resistance to officials whom 



il] CENTRALISATION. 185 

they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were 
more than a little afraid of the very men out of whose 
ranks they had sprung. 

The French Government — one may say, every 
Government on the Continent in those days — had the 
special weakness of all bureaucracies ; namely, that 
want of moral force which compels them to fall back 
at last on physical force, and transforms the ruler into 
a bully, and the soldier into a policeman and a gaoler. 
A Government of parvenus, uncertain of its own 
position, will be continually trying to assert itself to 
itself, by vexatious intermeddling and intruding pre- 
tensions ; and then, when it meets with the resistance 
of free and rational spirits, will either recoil in 
awkward cowardice, or fly into a passion, and appeal 
to the halter and the sword. Such a Government can 
never take itself for granted, because it knows that it 
is not taken for granted by the people. It never can 
possess the quiet assurance, the courteous dignity, 
without swagger, yet without hesitation, which belongs 
to hereditary legislators ; by which term is to be 
understood, not merely kings, not merely noblemen, 
but every citizen of a free nation, however democratic, 
who has received from his forefathers the right, the 
duty, and the example of self-government. 

Such was the political and social state of the 
Ancien Regime, not only in France, but if we are to 
trust (as we must trust) M. de Tocqueville, in almost 
every nation in Europe, except Britain. 

And as for its moral state. We must look for that 
— if we have need, which happily all have not — in its 
lighter literature. 

I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French 
memoirs — of which those of Madame de Sevigne are 



186 >THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

on the whole, the most painful (as witness her com- 
ments on the Marquise de Brinvilliers's execution), 
because written by a woman better and more human 
than ordinary. Nor with "■ Menagiana," or other 
'ana's — as vain and artificial as they are often foul; 
nor with novels and poems, long since deservedly 
forgotten. On the first perusal of this lighter 
literature, you will be charmed with the ease, grace, 
lightness with which everything is said. On the 
second, you will be somewhat cured of your admira- 
tion, as you perceive how little there is to say. The 
head proves to be nothing but a cunning mask, with 
no brains inside. Especially is this true of a book, 
which I must beg those who have read it already, 
to recollect. To read it I recommend no human being. 
We may consider it, as it was considered in its time, 
the typical novel of the Ancien Regime. A picture of 
Spanish society, written by a Frenchman, it was held 
to be — and doubtless with reason — a picture of the 
whole European world. Its French editor (of 1836) 
calls it a grande epopee', "one of the most prodi- 
gious efforts of intelligence, exhausting all forms of 
humanity'' — in fact, a second Shakespeare, according 
to the lights of the year 1715. I mean, of course, " Gil 
Bias." So picturesque is the book, that it has fur- 
nished inexhaustible motifs to the draughtsman. So 
excellent is its workmanship, that the enthusiastic 
editor of 1836 tells us — and doubtless he knows best 
— that it is the classic model of the French tongue; 
and that, as Le Sage " had embraced all that belonged 
to man in his composition, he dared to prescribe to 
himself to embrace the whole French language in 
his work." It has been the parent of a whole school 
of literature — -the Bible of tens of thousands, with 



ii.] CENTBALISATIOtf. 187 

admiring commentators in plenty; on whose sonls 
may God have mercy ! 

And no wonder. The book has a solid value, and 
will always have, not merely from its perfect art (ac- 
cording to its own measure and intention), but from 
its perfect truthfulness. It is the Ancien Regime 
itself. It set forth to the men thereof, themselves, 
without veil or cowardly reticence of any kind; and 
inasmuch as every man loves himself, the Ancien 
Regime loved li Gil Bias/' and said, " The problem 
of humanity is solved at last/' But, ye long-suffering 
powers of heaven, what a solution ! It is beside the 
matter to call the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le 
Sage would have answered : c ' Of course it is ; for so 
is the world of which it is a picture." No ; the most 
notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity ; 
its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the 
human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an 
epos, the actors in it are not men and women, but 
ferrets — with here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, 
on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman 
mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human 
heart can find no more interest than in a pathological 
museum. 

That last, indeed, <c Gil Bias " is ; a collection of 
diseased specimens. No man or woman in the book, 
lay or clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I can re- 
member, do their duty in any wise, even if they recol- 
lect that they have any duty to do. Greed, chicane, 
hypocrisy, uselessness are the ruling laws of human 
society. A new book of Ecclesiastes, crying, " Vanity 
of vanity, all is vanity;" the " conclusion of the whole 
matter" being left out, and the new Ecclesiastes 
rendered thereby diabolic, instead of like that old 



188 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

one, divine. For, instead of ' ' Fear God and keep his 
commandments, for that is the whole duty of man," 
Le Sage sends forth the new conclusion, " Take care 
of thyself, and feed on thy neighbours, for that is the 
whole duty of man." And very faithfully was his advice 
(easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a 
century after " Gil Bias " appeared. 

About the same time there appeared, by a re- 
markable coincidence, another work, like it the child 
of the Ancien Regime, and yet as opposite to it as 
light to darkness. If Le Sage drew men as they were, 
Fenelon tried at least to draw thern as they might 
have been, and still might be, were they governed 
by sages and by saints, according to the laws of God. 
" Telemaque " is an ideal — imperfect, doubtless, as all 
ideals must be in a world in which God's ways and 
thoughts are for ever higher than man's ; but an ideal 
nevertheless. If its construction is less complete than 
that of " Gil Bias/' it is because its aim is infinitely 
higher ; because the form has to be subordinated, 
here and there, to the matter. If its political economy 
be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind 
of one man must needs have been too weak to bring 
into shape and order the chaos, social and economic, 
which he saw around him. M. de Lamartine, in his 
brilliant little life of Fenelon, does not hesitate to 
trace to the influence of " Telemaque," the Utopias 
which produced the revolutions of 1793 and 1848. 
" The saintly poet was," he says, " without knowing 
it, the first Radical and the first communist of his 
century." But it is something to have preached to 
princes doctrines till then unknown, or at least for- 
gotten for many a generation — free trade, peace, in- 
ternational arbitration, and the " carriere ouverte aux 



H-J CENTRALISATION. 189 

talents " for all ranks. It is something to have 
warned his generation of the dangerous overgrowth of 
the metropolis ; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew 
might have done, that the despotism which he saw 
around him would end in a violent revolution. It is 
something to have combined the highest Christian 
morality with a hearty appreciation of old Greek life ; 
of its reverence for bodily health and prowess; its 
joyous and simple country society; its sacrificial feasts, 
dances, games ; its respect for the gods ; its belief that 
they helped, guided, inspired the sons of men. It is 
something to have himself believed in God ; in a living 
God, who, both in this life and in all lives to come, 
rewarded the good and punished the evil by inevitable 
laws. It is something to have warned a young prince, 
in an age of doctrinal bigotry and practical atheism, 
that a living God still existed, and that his laws were 
still in force; to have shown him Tartarus crowded 
with the souls of wicked monarchs, while a few of 
kingly race rested in Elysium, and among them old 
pagans — Inachus, Oecrops, Erichthon, Triptolemus, 
and Sesostris — rewarded for ever for having done 
their duty, each according to his light, to the flocks 
which the gods had committed to their care. It is 
something to have spoken to a prince, in such an age, 
without servility, and without etiquette, of the frailties 
and the dangers which beset arbitrary rulers ; to have 
told him that royalty, "when assumed to content one- 
self, is a monstrous tyranny ; when assumed to fulfil 
its duties, and to conduct an innumerable people as a 
father conducts his children, a crushing slavery, which 
demands an heroic courage and patience." 

Let us honour the courtier who dared speak such 
truths; and still more the saintly celibate who had 



190 THE ANCIEN KE"GIME. [lect 

sufficient catholicity of mind to envelop them in old 
Grecian dress, and, without playing false for a moment 
to his own Christianity, seek in the writings of heathen 
sages a wider and a healthier view of humanity than 
was afforded by an ascetic creed. 

No wonder that the appearance of " Telemaque," 
published in Holland without the permission of 
Fenelon, delighted throughout Europe that public 
which is always delighted with new truths, as long 
as it is not required to practise them. To read 
" Telemaque '" was the right and the enjoyment of 
everyone. To obey it, the duty only of princes. No 
wonder that, on the other hand, this " Vengeance de 
peuples, lecon des rois," as M. de Lamartine calls it, 
was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis XIV., and 
completed the disgrace of. one who had dared to teach 
the future king of France that he must show himself, 
in all things, the opposite of his grandfather. No 
wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court 
looked on its portraits of wicked ministers and 
courtiers as caricatures of themselves ; portraits too, 
which, "composed thus in the palace of Versailles, 
under the auspices of that confidence which the king 
had placed in the preceptor of his heir, seemed a 
domestic treason." No wonder, also, if the foolish 
and envious world outside was of the same opinion ; 
and after enjoying for awhile this exposure of the 
great ones of the earth, left "Telemaque" as an 
Utopia with which private folks had no concern ; and 
betook themselves to the easier and more practical 
model of "Gil Bias." 

But there are solid defects in " Telemaque " — 
indicating corresponding defects in the author's mind 
— which would have, in any case, prevented its doing 



n.] CENTRALISATION. 191 

the good work which Fenelon desired ; defects which 
are natural, as it seems to rue, to his position as a 
Roman Catholic priest, however saintly and pure, 
however humane and liberal. The king, with him, 
is to be always the father of his people; which is 
tantamount to saying that the people are to be 
always children, and in a condition of tutelage ; 
voluntary, if possible : if not, of tutelage still. Of 
self-government, and education of human beings into 
free manhood by the exercise of self-government, free 
will, free thought — of this Fenelon had surely not a 
glimpse. A generation or two passed by, and then 
the peoples of Europe began to suspect that they 
were no longer children, but come to manhood ; and 
determined (after the example of Britain and America) 
to assume the rights and duties of manhood, at whatever 
risk of excesses or mistakes : and then " Telemaque " 
was relegated — half unjustly — as the slavish and 
childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, 
where it still remains.. 

But there is a defect in " Telemaque " which is 
perhaps deeper still. No woman in it exercises influence 
over man, except for evil. Minerva, the guiding and 
inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male 
form ; but her speech and thought is essentially 
masculine, and not feminine. Antiope is a mere lay- 
figure, introduced at the end of the book because 
Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of 
marrying someone or other. Venus plays but the 
same part as she does in the Tannenhauser legends of 
the Middle Age. Her hatred against Telemachus is 
an integral element of the plot. She, with the 
other women or nymphs of the romance, in spite of all 
Fenelon' s mercy and courtesy towards human frailties, 



192 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

really rise no higher than the witches of the Malleus 
Maleficanum. Woman — as the old monk held who 
derived femina from fe, faith, and minus, less, because 
women have less faith than men — is, in i ' Telemaque," 
whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the en- 
chantress ; the victim (according to a very ancient 
calumny) of passions more violent, often more lawless, 
than man's. 

Such a conception of women must make <{ Tele- 
maque," to the end of time, useless as a wholesome 
book of education. It must have crippled its influence, 
especially in France, in its own time. For there, for 
good and for evil, woman was asserting more and more 
her power, and her right to power, over the mind and 
heart of man. Rising from the long degradation of the 
Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when 
unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, 
often lawlessly, always triumphantly, her just freedom; 
her true place as the equal, the coadjutor, the counsellor 
of man. Of all problems connected with the education 
of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, 
in the France of the Ancien Regime, the most im- 
portant. And it was just that which Fenelon did 
not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he 
most certainly could not have solved. Meanwhile, 
not only Madame de Maintenon, but women whose 
names it were a shame to couple with hers, must have 
smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted 
to dispense not only with them, but with the ideal 
queen who should have been the helpmeet of the ideal 
king. 

To those who believe that the world is governed 
by a living God, it may seem strange, at first sight, 
that this moral anarchy was allowed to endure ; that 



ii.] CENTRALISATION. 193 

the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the 
French Revolution, inevitable from Louis XFVVs latter 
years, was not allowed to burst two generations sooner 
than it did. Is not the answer — that the question 
always is not of destroying the world, but of amending 
it ? And that amendment must always come from 
within, and not from without ? That men must be 
taught to become men, and mend their world them- 
selves ? To educate men into self-government — that 
is the purpose of the government of Grod ; and some 
of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn 
that lesson. As the century rolled on, the human 
mind arose out of the slough in which Le Sage found 
it, into manifold and beautiful activity, increasing 
hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after 
truth and usefulness. With mistakes and confusions 
innumerable they worked : but still they worked ; 
planting good seed ; and when the fire of the French 
Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the 
rotten and the withered, only to let the fresh herbage 
spring up from underneath. 

But that purifying fire was needed. If we inquire 
why the many attempts to reform the Ancien Regime, 
which the eighteenth century witnessed, were failures 
one and all ; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda 
in Spain, Joseph II. in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline 
in Naples — for these last, be it always remembered, 
began as humane and enlightened sovereigns, patronis- 
ing liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the 
condition of the poor, till they were driven by the 
murder of Marie Antoinette into a paroxysm of rage 
and terror — why, above all, Louis XVI., who attempted 
deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, 
failed more disastrously than any — is not the answer 
VOL. I,: — h. e. o 



194 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

this, that all these reforms would but have cleansed 
the outside of the cup and the platter, while they left 
the inside full of extortion and excess ? It was not 
merely institutions which required to be reformed, but 
men and women. The spirit of " Gil Bias " had to be 
cast out. The deadness, selfishness, isolation of men's 
souls ; their unbelief in great duties, great common 
causes, great self-sacrifices — in a word, their unbelief 
in God, and themselves, and mankind — all that had to 
be reformed ; and till that was done all outward reform, 
would but have left them, at best, in brute ease and 
peace, to that soulless degradation, which (as in the 
Byzantine empire of old, and seemingly in the Chinese 
empire of to-day) hides the reality of barbarism under 
a varnish of civilisation. Men had to be awakened ; 
to be taught to think for themselves, act for them- 
selves, to dare and suffer side by side for their country 
and for their children ; in a word, to arise and become 
men once more. 

And, what is more, men had to punish — to avenge. 
Those are fearful words. But there is, in this God- 
guided universe, a law of retribution, which will find 
men out, whether men choose to find it out or not ; 
a law of retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, 
though not necessarily by just meD. The public 
executioner was seldom a very estimable personage, 
at least under the old Regime ; and those who have 
been the scourges of God have been, in general, mere 
scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, 
confusedly ; confounding too often the innocent with 
the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime 
by crime, and replace old sins by new. But, however 
insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, I must 
believe — as long as I believe in any God at all — that 



it.] CENTRALISATION. 195 

such men as Eobespierre were His instruments, even 
in their crimes. 

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the 
wickedness of certain of its leaders was part of the 
retribution itself. For the noblesse existed surely to 
make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very 
opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, 
whom it itself had made wicked. For over and above 
all political, economic, social wrongs, there were wrongs 
personal, human, dramatic ; which stirred not merely 
the springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just 
demand for the freedom of labour and enterprise : 
but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt, and 
hate ; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors 
of the Revolution. 

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply 
implicated in those horrors were of the artist class — 
by which I signify not merely painters and sculptors — 
as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to 
signify, at least in England — but what the French 
meant by artistes — producers of luxuries and amuse- 
ments, play-actors, musicians, and suchlike, down to 
that " distracted peruke-maker with two fiery torches," 
who, at the storm of the Bastile, e ' was for burning the 
saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run 
screaming; had not a patriot, with some tincture of 
natural philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of 
him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned 
the barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The 
distracted peruke-maker may have had his wrongs — 
perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the fool, 
in " Le Roi s'amuse " — and his own sound reasons for 
blowing down the Bastile, and the system which kept 
it up. 

o 2 



liV» THE ANCIKN RKCntE. [racf. 

For those very ministers of luxury — then miscalled 
art — from the periwig-maker to the play-aotor — who 
like them had seen the frivolity, the baseness, the 
profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered, 
whom they despised while they adored ! Figaro 
himself may have looked up to his master the Marquis 
as a superior being as long as the law enabled tho 
Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; 
yet Figaro may have known and seen enough to excuse 
him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for handing 
the Marquis over to a Comite do Salut Public. Pis- 
appointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois ; dis- 
appointed poets, like Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, 
especially ferocious. Why not? Ingenious, sensitive 
spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men and 
women whom they felt to be their own flesh and 
blood, they had, it may be, a juster appreciation of 
the actual worth of their patrons than had our own 
Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet : and no 
man was a hero to them. They had seen the nobleman 
expose himself before his own helots : they would try 
if the helot was not as good as the nobleman. The 
nobleman had played the mountebank : why should 
not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman ? 
The nobleman's God had been his five senses, with (to 
use Mr. Carlyle's phrase") the sixth sense of vanity : 
why should not the mountebank worship the same 
God, like Carriere at Xantes, and see what grace and 
gifts he too might obtain at that altar? 

But why so cruel ? Because, with many of these 
men, I more than suspect, there were wrongs to be 
avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth 
sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a 
great portion of the respectable middle class, and much 



il] CENTRALISATION. 197 

of the lower class : but wrongs to which they and their 
families, being most in contact with the noblesse, would 
be especially exposed ; namely, wrongs to women. 

Everyone who knows the literature of that time, 
must know what I mean : what had gone on for more 
than a century, it may be more than two, in France, in 
Italy, and — I am sorry to have to say it — Germany 
likewise. All historians know what I mean, and how 
enormous was the evil. I only wonder that they have 
so much overlooked that item in the causes of the 
Bevolution. It seems to me to have been more patent 
and potent in the sight of men, as it surely was in the 
sight of Almighty God, than all the political and 
economic wrongs put together. They might have 
issued in a change of dynasty or of laws. That, issued 
in the blood of the offenders. Not a girl was en- 
ticed into Louis XV/s Petit Trianon, or other den 
of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents 
nursing shame and sullen indignation, even while they 
fingered the ill-gotten price of their daughter's honour; 
and left behind also, perhaps, some unhappy boy of 
her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy 
were transformed — and who will blame him? — into 
righteous indignation, and a very sword of God ; all 
the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if 
education helped him to see, that the maiden's 
acquiescence, her pride in her own shame, was the 
ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most 
potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to 
a state of things in which such a fate was thought an 
honour and a gain, and not a disgrace and a ruin ; in 
which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes 
had learnt to think it more noble to become — that 
which they became — than the wives of honest men. 



198 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien 
Eegime, whether in France or elsewhere, you will see 
that my facts are true. If you have human hearts in 
you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explana- 
tion of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet 
explained only on the ground of madness — an hypo- 
thesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand 
what madness is) is no explanation at all. 

An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, 
varnish and gilding upon worm-eaten furniture, and 
mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien Eegime. 
And for that very reason a picturesque age ; like one 
of its own landscapes. A picturesque bit of unculti- 
vated mountain, swarming with the prince's game; 
a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins ; 
and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with 
its French fountains and gardens, French nymphs of 
marble, and of flesh and blood likewise, which the 
prince has partially paid for, by selling a few hundred 
young men to the English to fight the Yankees. The 
river, too, is picturesque, for the old bridge has not 
been repaired since it was blown up in the Seven 
Years' War ; and there is but a single lazy barge float- 
ing down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs 
of his Serene Highness; the village is picturesque, 
for the flower of the young men are at the wars, and 
the place is tumbling down ; and the two old peasants 
in the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper 
of vine-twigs, are very picturesque likewise,, for they 
are all in rags. 

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, 
and the quiet artistic beauty of the scene destroyed; — 
to have steamers puffing up and down the river, and a 
railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the 



il] CENTRALISATION. 199 

Old World, in exchange for the wealth of the New — 
or hurrying, it may be, whole regiments of free and 
educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they know for 
what. How sad to see the alte schloss desecrated by 
tourists, and the neue schloss converted into a cold- 
water cure. How sad to see the village, church and 
all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to the 
very steeple-top ; — a new school at the town-end — a 
new crucifix by the wayside. How sad to see the old 
folk well clothed in the fabrics of England or Belgium, 
doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the 
land they till has become their own, and not the 
prince's ; while their sons are thriving farmers on the 
prairies of the far West. Very unpicturesque, no 
doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety, clean- 
liness and comfort. But they possess advantages 
unknown to the Ancien Regime, which was, if nothing 
else, picturesque. Men could paint amusing and often 
pretty pictures of its people and its places. 

Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the 
notion of art which it expresses, are the children of 
the Ancien Regime — of the era of decay. The healthy, 
vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed 
of admiring, much less of painting*, for their own sake, 
rags and ruins ; the fashion sprang up at the end of 
the seventeenth century; it lingered on during the 
first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction 
from 1815-25. It is all but dead now, before the 
return of vigorous and progressive thought. An 
admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a sham 
ruin in his grounds ; he restores a church, blazing 
with colour, like a mediasval illumination. He has 
learnt to look on that which went by the name of 
picturesque in his great-grandfather's time, as an old 



200 THE ANOIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

Greek or a Middle Age monk would have done — as 
something squalid, ugly, a sign of neglect, disease, 
death ; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it 
cannot be restored. At Carcassone, now, M. Viollet- 
le-Duc, under the auspices of the Emperor of the 
French, is spending his vast learning, and much money, 
simply in abolishing the picturesque ; in restoring 
stone for stone, each member of that wonderful 
museum of Middle Age architecture : Eoman, Visi- 
gothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English, later Erench, 
all is being reproduced exactly as it must have existed 
centuries since. No doubt that is not the highest 
function of art: but it is a preparation for the highest, 
a step toward some future creative school. As the 
early Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed 
into their minds the beauty and meaning of old Greek 
and Roman art; so must the artists of our days by 
the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They 
must learn to copy, before they can learn to surpass ; 
and, meanwhile, they must learn — indeed they have 
learnt — that decay is ugliness, and the imitation of 
decay, a making money out of the public shame. 

The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can dis- 
cover, suddenly, during the time of exhaustion and 
recklessness which followed the great struggles of the 
sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of 
the earliest professors of picturesque art, have never 
been since surpassed. For indeed, they drew from 
life. The rags and the ruins, material, and alas ! 
spiritual, were all around them ; the lands and the 
creeds alike lay waste. There was ruffianism and 
misery among the masses of Europe; unbelief and 
artificiality among the upper classes ; churches and 
monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered 
and ruinate ; and all the wretchedness which Callot has 



il] CENTRALISATION. 201 

immortalised — for a warning to evil rulers — in his 
Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all gone wrong: 
but as for setting it right again — who could do that ? 
And so men fell into a sentimental regret for the 
past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the fore- 
shortening of time; while they wanted strength or 
faith to reproduce it. At last they became so accus- 
tomed to the rags and ruins, that they looked on them 
as the normal condition of humanity, as the normal 
field for painters. 

Only now and then, and especially toward the 
latter half of the eighteenth century, when thought 
began to revive, and men dreamed of putting the 
world to rights once more, there rose before them 
glimpses of an Arcadian ideal. Country life — the 
primaeval calling of men — how graceful and pure it 
might be ! How graceful — if not pure — it once had 
been ! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo 
might be true to present fact ; but there was a fairer 
ideal, which once had been fact, in the Eclogues of 
Theocritus, and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. 
And so men took to dreaming of shepherds and 
shepherdesses, and painting them on canvas, and 
modelling them in china, according to their cockney 
notions of what they had been once, and always 
ought to be. We smile now at Sevres and Dresden 
shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in 
them a certain pathos. They indicated a craving 
after something better than boorishness; and the many 
men and women may have become the gentler and 
purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to 
themselves : " Such might have been the peasantry of 
half Europe, had it not been for devastations of the 
Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills of 
emperors and kings. " 



LECTUEE III 



THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 



In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the 
human race owed more to the eighteenth century 
than to any century since the Christian era. It may 
seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the 
century which followed the revival of Greek literature, 
and consider that the eighteenth century was but the 
child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But I must 
persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be 
inconsistent with my description of the very same era 
as one of decay and death. F'or side by side with the 
death, there was manifold fresh birth ; side by side 
with the decay there was active growth ; — side by side 
with them, fostered by them, though generally in 
strong opposition to them, whether conscious or un- 
conscious. We must beware, however, of trying to 
find between that decay and that growth a bond of 
cause and effect where there is really none. The 
general decay may have determined the course of 
many men's thoughts ; but it no more set them 
thinking than (as I have heard said) the decay of the 



lect. in.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 203 

Ancien Regime produced the new Regime — a loose 
metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold 
water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. 
That would be to confess man — what I shall never 
confess him to be — the creature of circumstances ; it 
would be to fall into the same fallacy of spontaneous 
generation as did the ancients, when they believed that 
bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the 
first place, the bees were no bees, but flies — unless 
when some true swarm of honey bees may have taken 
up their abode within the empty ribs, as Samson's 
bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each 
sprang from an egg f independent of the carcass, 
having a vitality of its own : it was fostered by the 
carcass it fed on during development ; but bred from 
it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the 
decay of the Ancien Regime. There are flies which, 
by feeding on putridity, become poisonous themselves, 
as did Marat : but even they owe their vitality and 
organisation to something higher than that on which 
they feed ; and each of them, however, defaced and 
debased, was at first a " thought of God." All true 
manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances ; 
and if any man be the creature of circumstances, it 
is because he has become so, like the drunkard; be- 
cause he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward 
toward the brute. 

Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th 
century, a stirring of thought, an originality, a re- 
sistance to circumstances, an indignant defiance of 
circumstances, which would have been impossible, had 
circumstances been the true lords and shapers of man- 
kind. Had that latter been the case, the downward 
progress of the Ancien Regime would have been 



204 THE ANCIEN KE"GIME. [lect. 

irremediable. Each generation, conformed more and 
more to the element in which it lived, would have sunk 
deeper in dull acquiescence to evil, in ignorance of all 
cravings save those of the senses ; and if at any time 
intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it 
would have issued, not in the proclamation of new and 
vast ideas, but in an anarchic struggle for revenge 
and bread. 

There are races, alas ! which seem, for the present 
at least, mastered by circumstances. Some, like the 
Chinese, have sunk back into that state ; some, like 
the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged 
from it ; but in Europe, during the eighteenth century, 
were working not merely new forces and vitalities 
(abstractions which mislead rather than explain), but 
living- persons in plenty, men and women, with inde- 
pendent and original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite 
of all circumstances, with power which we shall most 
wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord and 
Giver of Life. 

Such persons seemed — I only say seemed — most 
numerous in England and in Germany. But there 
were enough of them in France to change the destiny 
of that great nation for awhile — perhaps for ever. 

M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very 
remarkable one, which appears at first sight to militate 
against my belief — a chapter " showing that France 
was the country in which men had become most 
alike." 

" The men," he says, " of that time, especially 
those belonging to the upper and middle ranks of 
society, who alone were at all conspicuous, were all 
exactly alike/ ' 

And it must be allowed, that if this were true of 



m.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 205 

the upper and middle classes, it must have been still 
more true of the mass of the lowest population, who, 
being most animal, are always most moulded — or 
rather crushed — by their own circumstances, by public 
opinion, and by the wants of five senses, common to 
all alike. 

But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious 
fact to the circumstances of their political state — to 
that " government of one man which in the end has 
the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all 
mutually indifferent to their common fate " — we must 
differ, even from him: for facts prove the impotence 
of that, or of any other circumstance, in altering the 
hearts and souls of men, in producing in them anything 
but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance. 

For all the while there was, among these very 
French, here and there a variety of character and 
purpose, sufficient to burst through that very des- 
potism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, 
and quite original shapes. Thus it was proved that 
the uniformity had been only in their outside crust 
and shell. What tore the nation to pieces during the 
Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and 
originality of the characters which found themselves 
suddenly in free rivalry ? What else gave to the 
undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the 
parvenu heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a 
self-dependent audacity, which made them the con- 
querors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of the 
civilised world ? If there was one doctrine which the 
French Revolution specially proclaimed — which it 
caricatured till it brought it into temporary disrepute 
— it was this : that no man is like another ; that in 
each is a God-given " individuality/'' an independent 



206 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

soul, which uo government or man has a right to 
crush, or can crush in the long run : but which ought 
to have, and must have, a " carriere ouverte aux 
talents," freely to do the best for itself in the battle 
of life. The French Revolution, more than any event 
since twelve poor men set forth to convert the world 
some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man 
ought not to be, and need not be, the creature of 
circumstances, the puppet of institutions; but, if he 
will, their conqueror and their lord. 

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life 
out of death, and the modern world out of the decay 
of the mediasval world, the French pliilosophes and 
encyclopedists are, of course, the most notorious. 
They confessed, for the most part, that their original 
inspiration had come from England. They were, or 
considered themselves, the disciples of Locke; whose 
philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved. 

And first, a few words on these same pliilosophes. 
One may be thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of 
their sins., moral as well as intellectual ; and yet one 
may demand that everyone should judge them fairly 
— which can only be done by putting himself in their 
place ; and any fair judgment of them will, I think, 
lead to the conclusion that they were not mere de- 
stroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which man- 
kind had as yet held sacred. Whatever sacred things 
they despised, one sacred thing they reverenced, which 
men had forgotten more and more since the seventeenth 
century — common justice and common humanity. It 
was this, I believe, which gave them their moral force. 
It was this which drew towards them the hearts, not 
merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on the 
menu peuple they had no influence, and did not care 



m.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 207 

to have any), but of every continental sovereign who 
felt in himself higher aspirations than those of a 
mere selfish tyrant — Frederick the Great, Christina of 
Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, 
Catharine of Russia, with all her sins. To take the 
most extreme instance — Yoltaire. We may question 
his being a philosopher at all. We may deny that he 
had even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may 
doubt much whether he had any of that human and 
humorous common sense, which is often a good sub- 
stitute for the philosophy of the schools. We may 
feel against him a just and honest indignation when 
we remember that he dared to travestie into a foul 
satire the tale of his country's purest and noblest 
heroine ; but we must recollect, at the same time, that 
he did a public service to the morality of his own 
country, and of all Europe, by his indignation — quite 
as just and honest as any which we may feel — at the 
legal murder of Calas. We must recollect that, if 
he exposes baseness and foulness with too cynical a 
license of speech (in which, indeed, he sinned no more 
than had the average of French writers since the 
days of Montaigne), he at least never advocates them, 
as did Le Sage. We must recollect that, scattered 
throughout his writings, are words in favour of that 
which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at 
times, in favour of that which is pure ; which proves 
that in Voltaire, as in most men, there was a double 
self — the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and 
folly which he saw around him — the other, hungering 
after a nobler life, and possibly exciting that hunger 
in one and another, here and there, who admired him 
for other reasons than the educated mob, which cried 
after him " Vive la Pucelle." 



20S THE ANCIEN E^GIME. [lecT. 

Rousseau, too. Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, 
for the " Confessions " and the " Nouvelle Heloise " — ■ 
for much, too much, in the man's own life and cha- 
racter. One would think the worse of the young 
Englishman who did not so feel, and express his 
feelings roundly and roughly. But all young English- 
men should recollect, that to Rousseau's "Emile" 
they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, 
the degrading brutalities, of the mediaeval system of 
school education ; that " Emile " awakened through- 
out civilised Europe a conception of education just, 
humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded 
upon facts ; that if it had not been written by one 
writhing under the bitter consequences of mis-educa- 
tion, and feeling their sting and their brand day by 
day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never 
have reformed our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public 
schools. 

Aud so with the rest of the pliilosophes. That 
there were charlatans among them, vain men, pre- 
tentious men, profligate men, selfish, self-seeking, and 
hypocritical men, who doubts ? Among what class of 
men were there not such in those evil days ? In what 
class of men are there not such now, in spite of all 
social and moral improvement ? But nothing but the 
conviction, among the average, that they were in the 
right — that they were fighting a battle for which it 
was worth while to dare, and if need be to suffer, 
could have enabled them to defy what was then public 
opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force. 

Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can 
deny that their inductions were hasty and partial : but 
then they were inductions as opposed to the dull 
pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition only 



m.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 209 

half believed, or pretended to be believed. No one can 
deny that their theories were too general and abstract; 
but then they were theories as opposed to the no- 
theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, " Let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." 

Theories — principles — by them if men do not live, 
by them men are, at least, stirred into life, at the 
sight of something more noble than themselves. 
Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a 
world as that which Le Sage painted, be roused out 
of its slough of foul self-satisfaction, and equally foul 
self-discontent. 

For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, 
not by practical considerations, not by self-interest, 
not by compromises ; but by theories and principles, 
and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural, 
and literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they 
be according to reason or not, are so little according 
to logic — that is, to speakable reason — that they can- 
not be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or in 
masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give 
reasons quite incompetent, often quite irrelevant ; but 
which they have caught from each other, as they catch 
fever or small-pox ; as unconsciously, and yet as prac- 
tically and potently; just as the nineteenth century 
has caught from the philosophers of the eighteenth 
most practical rules of conduct, without even (in most 
cases) having read a word of their works. 

And what has this century caught from these 
philosophers ? One rule it has learnt, and that a most 
practical one — to appeal in all cases, as much as pos- 
sible, to " Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at 
least, the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. 
Their conceptions of reason and of the laws of nature 

vol. i. — h. e. p 



210 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

being often incorrect, they appealed to unreason and 
to laws which were not those of nature. " The fixed 
idea of them all was/" says M. de Toequeville, " to 
substitute simple and elementary rules, deduced from 
reason and natural law, for the complicated traditional 
customs which governed the society of their time/" 
They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their 
method. They ignored whole classes of facts., which, 
though spiritual and not physical, are just as much 
facts, and facts for science, as those which concern a 
stone or a fungus. They mistook for merely com- 
plicated traditional customs, many most sacred insti- 
tutions which were just as much founded on reason 
and natural law, as any theories of their own. But 
who shall say that their method was not correct ? 
That it was not the only method ? They appealed to 
reason. Would you have had them appeal to unreason? 
They appealed to natural law. Would you have had 
them appeal to unnatural law ? — law according to 
which God did not make this world? Alas ! that had 
been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in 
his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no 
good end. Eabelais saw it done in his time ; and 
wrote his chapters on the fc Children of Physis and the 
Children of Antiphysis."" But, born in an evil genera- 
tion, which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the 
revolution of 1789, he was sensual and, I fear, cowardly 
enough to hide his light, not under a bushel, but under 
a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests ; and 
his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more 
foolish generations which followed him, and thought 
they understood him. 

But as for appealing to natural law for that which 
is good for men, and to reason for the power of dis- 



tii. J THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 211 

cernmg that same good — if man cannot find truth by 
that method, by what method shall he find it ? 

And thus it happened that, though these philo- 
sophers and encyclopaedists were not men of science, 
they were at least the heralds and the coadjutors of 
science. 

We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, 
fanatics. But we must recollect that one thing they 
meant to do, and did. They recalled men to facts ; 
they bid them ask of everything they saw — What 
are the facts of the case? Till we know the facts, 
argument is worse than useless. 

Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case 
must deliver men more or less from that evil spirit 
which the old Romans called "Fama;" from her 
whom Virgil described in the iEneid as the ugliest, 
the falsest, and the cruellest of monsters. 

From u Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggera- 
tions, scandals, superstitions, public opinions — whether 
from the ancient public opinion that the sun went 
round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that 
those who dared to differ from public opinion were 
hateful to the deity, and therefore worthy of death 
• — from all these blasts of Fame's lying trumpet 
they helped to deliver men ; and they therefore helped 
to insure something like peace and personal security 
for those quiet, modest, and generally virtuous men, 
who, as students of physical science, devoted their 
lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of 
nature — What are the facts of the case ? 

It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause 
r.nd effect, that during the century of pliilosopli.es 
sound physical science throve, as she had never thriven 
before ; that in zoology and botany, chemistry and 

p 2 



212 THE ANGIEN REGIME. [lect. 

medicine, geology and astronomy, man after man, both 
of the middle and the noble classes, laid down on more 
and more sound, because more and more extended 
foundations, that physical science which will endure 
as an everlasting heritage to mankind; endure, even 
though a second Byzantine period should reduce it to 
a timid and traditional pedantry, or a second irruption 
of barbarians sweep it away for awhile, to revive again 
(as classic philosophy revived in the fifteenth cen- 
tury) among new and more energetic races ; when the 
kingdom of God shall have been taken away from 
us, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits 
thereof. 

An eternal heritage, I say, for the human race ; 
which once gained, can never be lost ; which stands, 
and will stand ; marches, and will march, proving its 
growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty 
of final victory, by those very changes, disputes, 
mistakes, which the ignorant and the bigoted hold up 
to scorn, as proofs of its uncertainty and its rotten- 
ness ; because they never have dared or cared to ask 
boldly — What are the facts of the case ? — and have 
never discovered either the acuteness, the patience, 
the calm justice, necessary for ascertaining the facts, 
or their awful and divine certainty when once 
ascertained. 

[But these philosophers (it will be said) hated all 
religion. 

Before that question can be fairly discussed, it is 
surely right to consider what form of religion that was 
which they found working round them in France, and 
on the greater part of the Continent. The quality 
thereof may have surely had something to do (as they 
themselves asserted) with that " sort of rage " with 



m.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 213 

which (to use M. de Tocqueville's words) " the Christian 
religion was attacked in France." 

M. de Tocqueville is of opinion (and his opinion 
is likely to be just) that " the Church was not more 
open to attack in France than elsewhere ; that the 
corruptions and abuses which had been allowed to 
creep into it were less, on the contrary, there than 
in most Catholic countries. The Church of France 
was infinitely more tolerant than it ever had been 
previously, and than it still was among other nations. 
Consequently, the peculiar causes of this phenomenon" 
(the hatred which it aroused) " must be looked for less 
in the condition of religion than in that of society." 

"We no longer," he says, shortly after, " ask in 
what the Church of that day erred as a religious 
institution, but how far it stood opposed to the 
political revolution which was at hand." And he goes 
on to show how the principles of her ecclesiastical 
government, and her political position, were such that 
the johilosophes must needs have been her enemies. 
But he mentions another fact which seems to me to 
belong neither to the category of religion nor to that 
of politics ; a fact which, if he had done us the honour 
to enlarge upon it, might have led him and his readers 
to a more true understanding of the disrepute into 
which Christianity had fallen in France. 

(< The ecclesiastical authority had been specially 
employed in keeping watch over the progress of 
thought; and the censorship of books was a daily 
annoyance to the philosophes. By defending the 
common liberties of the human mind against the 
Church, they were combating in their own cause : and 
they began by breaking the shackles which pressed 
most closely on themselves." 



214 THE ANOIEN REGIME. [lecI?. 

Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they 
pressed first and most earnestly reforms which they 
knew by painful experience to be necessary. All 
reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to 
their honour if, not content with shaking off their 
own fetters, they begin to see that others are fettered 
likewise; and, reasoning from the particular to the 
universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause 
of mankind. 

There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these 
men were honest, when they said that they were 
combating, not in their own cause merely, but in that 
of humanity ; and that the Church was combating in 
her own cause, and that of her power and privilege. 
The Church replied that she, too, was combating for 
humanity ; for its moral and eternal well-being. But 
that is just what the philosophes denied. They said 
(and it is but fair to take a statement which appears 
on the face of all their writings ; which is the one 
key-note on which they ring perpetual changes), that 
the cause of the Church in France was not that of 
humanity, but of inhumanity; not that of nature, but 
of unnature ; not even that of grace, but of disgrace. 
Truely or falsely, they complained that the French 
clergy had not only identified themselves with the 
repression of free thought, and of physical science, 
especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that 
they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries 
past, to exercise any censorship whatsoever over the 
thoughts of men : that they had identified them- 
selves with the cause of darkness, not of light ; with 
persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of 
Louis XIV., with the murder of Calas and of Urban 
Grandier ; with celibacy, hysteria, demonology, witch- 



in.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 215 

craft, and the shameful public scandals, like those of 
Gauffredi, Grandier, and Pere Giraud, which had arisen 
out of mental disease; with forms of worship which 
seemed to them (rightly or wrongly) idolatry, and 
miracles which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly) 
impostures ; that the clergy interfered perpetually 
with the sanctity of family life, as well as with the 
welfare of the state ; that their evil counsels, and 
specially those of the Jesuits, had been patent and 
potent causes of much of the misrule and misery of 
Louis XIY/s and XV/s reigns; and that with all 
these heavy counts against them, their morality was 
not such as to make other men more moral ; and was 
not — at least among the hierarchy — improving, or 
likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a De Retz, a 
Eichelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a 
Dubois, a Rohan, a Lomenie de Brienne, a Maury, a 
Talleyrand; and at the revolution of 1789 thoughtful 
Frenchmen asked, once and for all, what was to 
be done with a Church of which these were the 
hierophants ? 

Whether these complaints affected the French 
Church as a " religious" institution, must depend 
entirely on the meaning which is attached to the 
word "religion" : that they affected her on scientific, 
rational, and moral grounds, independent of any 
merely political one, is as patent as that the attack 
based on them was one-sided, virulent, and often 
somewhat hypocritical, considering the private morals 
of many of the assailants. We know — or ought to 
know — that within that religion which seemed to the 
philosophes (so distorted and defaced had it become) 
a nightmare dream, crushing the life out of mankind, 
there lie elements divine, eternal; necessary for man 



816 THE ANCIEN REGIME, [lect. 

in this life and the life to come. But we are bound to 
ask — Had they a fair chance of knowing what we 
know ? Have we proof that their hatred was against 
all religion, or only against that which they saw 
around them ? Have we proof that they would hare 
equally hated, had they been in permanent contact 
with them, creeds more free from certain faults which 
seemed to them, in the case of the French Church, 
ineradicable and inexpiable ? Till then we must have 
charity — which is justice — even for the philosophes of 
the eighteenth century. 

This view of the case had been surely overlooked 
by M. de Tocqueville, when he tried to explain by the 
fear of revolutions, the fact that both in America and 
in England, " while the boldest political doctrines of 
the eighteenth-century philosophers have been adopted, 
their anti-religious doctrines have made no way." 

He confesses that, "Among the English, French 
irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before 
the greater part of the French philosophers were 
born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. 
Throughout the eighteenth century infidelity had 
celebrated champions in England. Able writers and 
profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were 
never able to render it triumphant as in France/' Of 
these facts there can be no doubt : but the cause 
which he gives for the failure of infidelity will surely 
sound new and stranq-e to those who know the Enq-lish 
literature and history of that century. It was, he 
says, " inasmuch as all those who had anything to fear 
from revolutions, eagerly came to the rescue of the 
established faith." Surely there was no talk of 
revolutions ; no wish, expressed or concealed, to over- 
throw either government or society, in the aristocratic 



in.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 217 

clique to whom English infidelity was confined. Such, 
was, at least, the opinion of Voltaire, who "boasted, that 
" All the works of the modern philosophers together 
would never make as much noise in the world, as was 
made in former days by the disputes of the Cordeliers 
about the shape of their sleeves and hoods." If (as 
M. de Tocqueville says) Bolingbroke set up Voltaire, 
neither master nor pupil had any more leaning than 
Hobbes had toward a democracy which was not dreaded 
in those days because it had never been heard of. And 
if (as M. de Tocqueville heartily allows) the English 
apologists of Christianity triumphed, at least for the time 
being, the cause of their triumph must be sought in 
the plain fact that such men as Berkeley, Butler, and 
Paley, each according to his light, fought the battle 
fairly, on the common ground of reason and philosophy, 
instead of on that of tradition and authority; and that 
the forms of Christianity current in England — whether 
Quaker, Puritan, or Anglican — offended, less than that 
current in France, the common-sense and the human 
instincts of the many, or of the sceptics themselves.] 

But the eighteenth century saw another movement, 
all the more powerful, perhaps, because it was con- 
tinually changing its shape, even its purpose; and 
gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every 
change. Propagated at first by men of the school of 
Locke, it became at last a protest against the 
materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or 
calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, 
and honestly, all politics, it found itself sucked into the 
political whirlpool in spite of itself, as all human 
interests which have any life in them must be at last. 
It became an active promoter of the Bevolution ; then 
it helped to destroy the Eevolution, when that had, 



218 TlIE ANOIEN REGIME. [rata. 

under Napoleon, become a levelling* despotism; then 
it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles 
alive, after the reaction of 1815 : — a Protean institution, 
whose power we in England are as apt to undervalue 
as the governments of the Continent were apt, during 
the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it. I mean, of 
course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, 
honestly and honourably disowned by Freemasonry, 
yet have either copied it, or actually sprung out of it. 
In England, Freemasonry never was, it seems, more 
than a liberal and respectable benefit-club ; for secret 
societies are needless for any further purposes, amid 
free institutions and a free press. But on the Continent 
during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry excited 
profound suspicion and fear on the part of states- 
men who knew perfectly well their friends from their 
foes; and whose precautions were, from their point of 
view, justified by the results. 

I shall not enter into the deep question of the 
origin of Freemasonry. One uninitiate, as I am, has 
no right to give an opinion on the great questions of 
the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch 
degrees ; on the seven Templars, who, after poor 
Jacques Molay was burnt at Paris, took refuge on the 
Isle of Mull, in Scotland, found there another Templar 
and brother Mason, ominously named Harris ; took to 
the trowel in earnest, and revived the Order ; — on the 
Masons who built Magdeburg Cathedral in 876 ; on 
the English Masons assembled in Pagan times bv 
" St. Albone, that worthy knight ; " on the revival of 
English Masonry by Edwin, son of Athelstan ; on 
Magnus Grecus, who had been at the building of 
Solomon's Temple, and taught Masonry to Charles 
Martel ; on the pillars Jachin and Boaz ; on the 



m.J THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 219 

masonry of Hi rani of Tyre, and indeed of Adam him- 
self, of whose first fig-leaf the masonic apron may be 
a type — on all these matters I dare no more decide 
than on the making of the Trojan Horse, the birth of 
Romulus and Remus, or the incarnation of Vishnoo. 

All I dare say is, that Freemasonry emerges 
in its present form into history and fact, seemingly 
about the beginning of George I/s reign, among 
Englishmen and noblemen, notably in four lodges in 
the city of London : (1) at The Goose and Gridiron 
alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard ; (2) at The Crown 
alehouse near Drury Lane; (3) at The Apple Tree 
tavern near Covent Garden ; (4) at The Rummer and 
Grapes tavern, in Charnel Row, Westminster. That 
its principles were brotherly love and good fellowship, 
which included in those days port, sherry, claret, and 
punch ; that it was founded . on the ground of mere 
humanity, in every sense of the word ; being (as was 
to be expected from the temper of the times) both 
aristocratic and liberal, admitting to its ranks virtuous 
gentlemen " obliged," says an old charge, " only to 
that religion wherein all men agree, leaving their par- 
ticular opinions to themselves : that is, to be good 
men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by 
whatever denominations or persuasions they may be 
distinguished ; whereby Masonry becomes the centre 
of union and means of conciliating true friendship 
among persons that otherwise must have remained at 
a distance" 

Little did the honest gentlemen who established or 
re-established their society on these grounds, and 
fenced it with quaint ceremonies, old or new, conceive 
the importance of their own act ; we, looking at it from 
a distance, may see all that such a society involved, 



220 THE ANOIEN REGIME. [lect. 

which, was quite new to the world just then; and see, that 
it was the very child of the Ancien Regime — of a time 
when men were growing weary of the violent factions, 
political and spiritual, which had torn Europe in pieces 
for more than a century, and longed to say : " After 
all, we are all alike in one thing — for we are at least 
men/ ; 

Its spread through England and Scotland, and the 
seceding bodies which arose from it, as well as the 
supposed Jacobite tendency of certain Scotch lodges, 
do not concern us here. The point interesting to us 
just now is, that Freemasonry was imported to the 
Continent exclusively by English and Scotch gentle- 
men and noblemen. Lord Derwentwater is said by 
some to have founded the " Loge Anglaise " in Paris 
in 1725 ; the Duke of Richmond one in his own castle 
of Aubigny shortly after. It was through Hanoverian 
influence that the movement seems to have spread into 
Germany. In 1733, for instance^ the English Grand 
Master, Lord Strathmore, permitted eleven German 
gentlemen and good brethren to form a lodge in 
Hamburg. Into this English Society was Frederick 
the Great, when Crown Prince, initiated, in spite of 
strict old Frederick William's objections, who had 
heard of it as an English invention of irreligious 
tendency. Francis I. of Austria was made a Free- 
mason at the Hague, Lord Chesterfield being in the 
chair, and then became a Master in London under the 
name of " Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of 
Maria Theresa, whose woman's wit saw farther than 
her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen introduced 
the new society into Russia and into Geneva. Sweden 
and Poland seem to have received it from France; 
while, in the South, it seems to have been exclusively an 



Hi.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 221 

English plant. Sackville, Duke of Middlesex, is said 
to have founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733, 
Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon 
in Portugal ; and everywhere, at the commencement 
of the movement, we find either London or Scotland 
the mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those 
liberal and humane ideas of which England was then 
considered, to her glory, as the only home left on 
earth. 

But, alas ! the seed sown grew up into strange 
shapes, according to the soil in which it rooted. False 
doctrine, heresy, and schism, according to Herr Findel, 
the learned and rational historian whom I have chiefly 
followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy. 
" In France/' so he bemoans himself, " first of all 
there shot up that baneful seed of lies and frauds, of 
vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the 
mischievous high degrees ; the misstatement that our 
order was allied to the Templars, and existed at the 
time of the Crusades ; the removal of old charges, the 
bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols 
and forms which awoke the love of secrecy ; knight- 
hood ; and, in fact, all which tended to poison Free- 
masonry." Herr Findel seems to attribute these evils 
principally to the "high degrees. " It would have 
been more simple to have attributed them to the 
morals of the French noblesse in the days of Louis 
Quinze. What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but 
corrupt fruit ? If some of the early lodges, like those 
of "La Felicite" and "L'Ancre," to which women 
were admitted, resembled not a little the Bacchic 
mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for the 
interference of the police, still no great reform was to 
be expected, when those Sovereign Masonic Princes, 



223 THE ANCIEN KE"GIME. [lect. 

the "Emperors of tlie East and West," quarrelled — 
knights of the East against knights of the West — till 
they were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge " Grand 
Orient," with Philippe Egalite, Due de Chartres, as 
their grand master, and as his representative, the 
hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of Count 
Cagliostro — Louis, Prince de Rohan. 
J~ But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and 
sensual French noblesse, became utterly frivolous and 
sensual itself, it took a deeper, though a questionably 
fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest 
German nobility. Forgetful as they too often were of 
their duty to their peoples — tyrannical, extravagant, 
debauched by French opinions, French fashions, French 
luxuries, till they had begunto despise their native speech, 
their native literature, almost their native land, and to 
hide their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of 
French outside civilisation, which the years 1807-13 
rubbed off them again with a brush of iron — they were 
yet Germans at heart ; and that German instinct for 
the unseen — call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you 
will, you cannot make it anything but a human fact, 
and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed fact 
— that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives 
peculiar value to German philosophy, poetry, art, 
religion, and above all to German family life, and 
which is just the complement needed to prevent our 
English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockisni from 
degenerating into materialism — that was only lying 
hidden, but not dead, in the German spirit. 

With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed 
a nobler and more earnest shape. Dropping, very soon, 
that Lockite and Philosoplie tone which had perhaps 
recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it 



in.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 223 

became medievalist and mystic. It craved after a 
resuscitation of old chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of 
the knightly ideal, and the old German biederheit 
unci tapferkeit, which were all defiled and overlaid by 
French fopperies. And not in vain ; as no struggle 
after a noble aim, however confused or fantastic, is 
ever in vain. Freemasonry was the direct parent of 
the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which £ 
freed Germany from Napoleon. (Whatever follies young 
members of them may have committed ; whatever Jahn 
and his Turnerei ; whatever the iron youths, with their 
iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a 
word, may have been said or done amiss, in that 
childishness which (as their own wisest writers often 
lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the 
German spirit, let it be always remembered that under 
the impulse first given by Freemasonry, as much as 
that given by such heroes as Stein and Scharnhorst, 
Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her 
in her sleep ; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it 
but for a moment, a free people alike in body and in 
soul. 

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which 
Germany owed to Masonic influences, one shrinks from 
saying much of the extravagances in which its Masonry 
indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are 
so characteristic of the age, so significant to the 
student of human nature, that they must be hinted at, 
though not detailed. 

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement 
confined to the aristocracy, or at least to the most 
educated classes ; and clear, too, that it fell in with a 
temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism 
into which the popular creeds had then been frozen — 



224 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

unsatisfied with their own Frenchified foppery and 
pseudo-philosophy — unsatisfied with want of all duty, 
purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a 
temper of mind it fell in : but that very temper was 
open (as it always is) to those dreams of a royal road 
to wisdom and to virtue, which have haunted, in all 
ages, the luxurious and the idle. 

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, 
of the wonderful secrets in nature and science and 
theosophy, which men expected to find and did not find 
in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Yoss — the 
translator of Homer — had to confess, that after " trying 
for eleven years to attain a perfect knowledge of the 
inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to be, and 
of its invisible guardians/' all he knew was that " the 
documents which he had to make known to the 
initiated were nothing more than a well got-up farce.'" 

But the mania was general. The high-born and 
the virtuous expected to discover some panacea for 
their own consciences in what Yoss calls, "A multitude 
of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you 
penetrate, and are made to have a moral application 
through some arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as 
if I were to attempt expounding the chaos on my 
writing-desk." 

A rich harvest-field was an aristocracy in such a 
humour, for quacks of every kind ; richer even than 
that of France, in that the Germans were at once more 
honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed 
more easily. The carcass was there : and the birds of 
prey were gathered together. 

Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, 
and his Potsdam gold-making ; — of Johnson, alias 
Leuchte, who passed himself off as a Grand Prior sent 



rlr.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 225 

from Scotland to resuscitate the order of Knights 
Templars ; who informed his disciples that the Grand 
Master Von Hund commanded 26,000 men ; that 
round the convent (what convent, does not appear) a 
high wall was erected, which was guarded day and 
night ; that the English navy was in the hands of the 
Order; that they had MSS. written by Hugo do 
Paganis (a mythic hero who often figures in these 
fables) ; that their treasure was in only three places 
in the world, in Ballenstadt, in the icy mountains of 
Savoy, and in China ; that whosoever drew on himself 
the displeasure of the Order, perished both body and 
soul; who degraded his rival Rosa to the sound of 
military music, and after having had, like every dog, 
his day, died in prison in the Wartburg; — of the 
Rosicrucians, who were accused of wanting to support 
and advance the Catholic religion — one would think 
the accusation was very unnecessary, seeing that their 
actual dealings were with the philosopher's stone, and 
the exorcism of spirits : and that the first apostle of 
the new golden Rosicrucian order, one Schropfer, 
getting into debt, and fearing exposure, finished his 
life in an altogether un-catholic manner at Leipsic in 
1774, by shooting himself; — of Keller and his Urim 
and Thummim ; — of Wollner (who caught the Crown 
Prince Frederick William) with his three names of 
Chrysophiron, Heliconus, and Ophiron, and his fourth 
name of Ormesus Magnus, under which all the 
brethren were to offer up for him solemn prayers and 
intercessions; — of Baron Heinrich von Ekker and 
Eckenhofen, gentleman of the bed-chamber and coun- 
sellor of the Duke of Coburg Saalfeld, and his Jewish 
colleague Hirschmann, with their Asiatic brethren 
and order named Ben Bicca, Cabalistic and Talmudic ; 
vol. i. — n. E. Q 



223 THE ANCIEN EEGIME. Elect. 

of the Illuininati, and poor Adam Weisshaupt, Pro- 
fessor of Canon and National Law at Ingoldstadt in 
Bavaria, who set up what he considered an Anti- 
Jesuitical order on a Jesuit model, with some vague 
hope, according to his own showing, of "perfecting 
the reasoning powers interesting to mankind, spread- 
ing the knowledge of sentiments both humane and 
social, checking wicked inclinations, standing up for 
oppressed and suffering virtue against all wrong*, 
promoting the advancement of men of merit, and in 
every way facilitating the acquirement of knowledge 
and science ; " — of this honest silly man, and his 
attempts to carry out all his fine projects by calling 
himself Spartacus, Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, 
Vienna Rome, and so forth ; — of Knigge, who picked 
his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made 
money and fame out of his plans, for as long as they 
lasted; — of Bode, the knight of the lilies of the valley, 
who, having caught Duke Ernest of Saxe Gotha, 
was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or 
more ascending orders of unwisdom ; — and finally of 
the Jesuits who, really with considerable excuses for 
their severity, fell upon these poor foolish Illuminati 
in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or 
imprisoned ; — of all this you may read in the pages of 
Dr. Findel, and in many another book. For, for- 
gotten as they are now, they made noise enough in 
their time. 

, -^ And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, 

which is usually held to be the most " materialistic " 
of epochs, was, in fact, a most " spiritualistic " one ; in 
which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers' stones, 
enchanters' wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as 
fashionable — as they will probably be again some day. 



in.] THE EXPLOSIYE FOECES. 227 

You have all heard of Cagliostro — " pupil of the 
sage Althotas, foster-child of the Scheriff of Mecca, 
probable son of the last king of Trebizond; named 
also Acharat, and e Unfortunate child of Nature ; ' by 
profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, 
friend of the poor and impotent ; grand -master 
of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science, 
spirit- summoner, gold- cook, Grand- Cophta, prophet, 
priest, Thaumaturgic moralist, and swindler " — born 
Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo ; — of him, and of his 
lovely Countess Seraphina — nee Lorenza Feliciani ? 
You have read what Goethe — and still more important, 
what Mr. Carlyle has written on him, as on one of the 
most significant personages of the age ? Remember, 
then, that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; 
that his success — nay, his having even conceived the 
possibility of success in the brain that lay within 
that " brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped " head — 
was made possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro 
lived in our time, public opinion would have pointed 
out to him other roads to honour — on which he would 
doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace 
try to be caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish 
pike who cannot gorge them. But the method most 
easy for a pike-nature like Cagliostro's, was in the 
eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of 
the nineteenth, to trade, in a materialist age, on the 
unsatisfied spiritual cravings of mankind. For what 
do all these phantasms betoken, but a generation 
ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, 
ignorance, and striving to escape therefrom by any 
and every mad superstition which seemed likely to give 
an answer to the awful questions — What are we, and 
where ? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen 

Q 2 



228 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [ties. 

and infinite aronnd it, which, tormented it like ghosts 
by day and night : a sight ludicrous or pathetic, 
according as it is looked on by a cynical or a human 
spirit. 

It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, im- 
probable. It is rather rational, probable, say certain 
to happen. Eational, I say; for the reason of man 
tells him, and has always told him, that he is a 
supernatural being, if by nature is meant that which 
is cognisable by his five senses : that his coming into 
this world, his relation to it, his exit from it — which 
are the three most important facts about him — are 
supernatural, not to be explained by any deductions 
from the impressions of his senses. And I make bold 
to say, that the recent discoveries of physical science 
— notably those of embryology — go only to justify 
that old and general belief of man. If man be told 
that the microscope and scalpel show no difference, 
in the first stage of visible existence, between him and 
the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer 
■ — as he will answer — So much the worse for the 
microscope and scalpel : so much the better for my 
old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life, death, 
a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, 
invisible, unknowable by any physical science whatso- 
ever. If you cannot render me a reason how I came 
hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will 
render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied 
by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction 
from some magical theory ; as did the mind of the 
eighteenth century when, revolting from materialism, 
it fled to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle 
of life. 

The old Eegime. Will our age, in its turn, ever 



in.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 229 

"be spoken of as an old Regime ? Will it ever be 
spoken of as a Regime at all ; as an organised, orderly- 
system of society and polity; and not merely as a 
chaos, an anarchy, a transitory struggle, of which the 
money-lender has been the real guide and lord ? 

But at least it will be spoken of as an age of 
progress, of rapid developments, of astonishing dis- 
coveries. 

Are you so sure of that ? There was an age of 
progress once. But what is our age — what is all 
which has befallen since 1815 — save after-swells of 
that great storm, which are weakening and lulling 
into heavy calm ? Are we on the eve of stagnation ? 
Of a long check to the human intellect ? Of a new 
Byzantine era, in which little men will discuss, and 
ape, the deeds which great men did in their fore- 
fathers' days? 

What progress — it is a question which some will 
receive with almost angry surprise — what progress has 
the human mind made since 1815 ? 

If the thought be startling, do me the great 
honour of taking it home, and verifying for yourselves 
its truth or its falsehood. I do not say that it is 
altogether true. No proposition concerning human 
things, stated so broadly, can be. But see for your- 
selves, whether it is not at least more true than false ; 
whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which we boast 
most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to 
the end of the eighteenth. Whether other men did 
not labour, and we have only entered into their 
labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content 
with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, 
is not a symptom — wholesome, prudent, modest, but 
still a symptom — of our consciousness that we are not 



230 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. 

as our grandfathers were; that we can no longer 
conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, 
the whole mind and heart of man, and drive him on to 
dare and suffer desperately. 

Railroads ? Electric telegraphs ? All honour to 
them in their place : but they are not progress ; they 
are only the fruits of past progress. No outward and 
material thing is progress; no machinery causes 
progress; it merely spreads and makes popular the 
results of progress. Progress is inward, of the soul. 
And, therefore, improved constitutions, and improved 
book instruction — now miscalled education — are not 
progress : they are at best only fruits and signs 
thereof. For they are outward, material; and progress, 
I say, is inward. The self-help and self-determination 
of the independent soul — that is the root of progress ; 
and the more human beings who have that, the more 
progress there is in the world. Give me a man who, 
though he can neither read nor write, yet dares think 
for himself, and do the thing he believes : that man 
will help forward the human race more than any 
thousand men who have read, or written either, a 
thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think 
for themselves. And better for his race, and better, 
I believe, in the sight of God, the confusions and 
mistakes of that one sincere brave man, than the 
second-hand and cowardly correctness of all the 
thousand. 

As for the " triumphs of science/'' let us honour, 
with astonishment and awe, the genius of those who 
invented them ; but let us remember that the things 
themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can 
kill our enemy, but with which also our enemy can 
kill us. Like all outward and material things, they 



m.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 231 

are equally fit for good and for evil. In England here 
■ — they have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing 
but blessings : but I have my very serious doubts 
whether they are likely to be blessings to the whole 
human race, for many an age to come. I can conceive 
them — may God avert the omen ! — the instruments of 
a more crushing executive centralisation, of a more 
utter oppression of the bodies and souls of men, than 
the world has yet seen. I can conceive — may God 
avert the omen ! — centuries hence, some future world- 
ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the 
centre of all telegraph-wires — a world-spider in the 
omphalos of his world-wide web ; and smiting from 
thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter 
a cry of pain, with a swiftness and surety to which 
the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were but clumsy 
and impotent. 

All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or 
evil, exactly as far as they are in the hands of good 
men or of bad. 

Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads 
and telegraphs, instead of inaugurating an era of 
progress, may possibly only retard it. "Hester sur un 
grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a young 
singer who had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which 
the world often follows, not only from prudence, but 
from necessity. They have done so much that it 
seems neither prudent nor possible to do more. They 
will rest and be thankful. 

Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes 
enough; but those changes had no further develop- 
ment. The new art of war, the new art of literature, 
remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, 
till the end of the eighteenth century. 



232 THE ANCIEN REGIME. [lect. 

And so it may be with our means of locomotion 
and intercommunion, and what depends on them. The 
vast and unprecedented amount of capital, of social 
interest, of actual human intellect invested — I may 
say locked up — in these railroads, and telegraphs, and 
other triumphs of industry and science, will not enter 
into competition against themselves. They will not 
set themselves free to seek new discoveries in directions 
which are often actually opposed to their own, always 
foreign to it. If the money of thousands are locked 
up in these great works, the brains of hundreds of 
thousands, and of the very shrewdest too, are equally 
locked up therein likewise ; and are to be subtracted 
from the gross material of social development, and 
added (without personal fault of their owners, who 
may be very good men) to the dead weight of vested 
selfishness, ignorance, and dislike of change. 

Yes. A Byzantine and stationary age is possible 
yet. Perhaps we are now entering* upon it ; an age 
in which mankind shall be satisfied with the " triumphs 
of science," and shall look merely to the greatest 
comfort (call it not happiness) of the greatest number ; 
and like the debased Jews of old, " having found the 
life of their hand, be therewith content," no matter in 
what mud-hole of slavery and superstition. 

But one hope there is, and more than a hope — one 
certainty, that however satisfied enlightened public 
opinion may become with the results of science, and 
the progress of the human race, there will be always a 
more enlightened private opinion or opinions, which 
will not be satisfied therewith at all; a few men of 
genius, a few children of light, it may be a few perse- 
cuted, and a few martyrs for new truths, who will wish 
the world not to rest and be thankful, but to be dis- 



ni.] THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES. 233 

contented with itself, ashamed of itself, striving and 
toiling upward, without present hope of gain, till it 
has reached that unknown goal which Bacon saw 
afar off, and like all other heroes, died in faith, not 
having received the promises, but seeking still a polity 
which has foundations, whose builder and maker is 
God. 

These will be the men of science, whether physical 
or spiritual. Not merely the men who utilise and 
apply that which is known (useful as they plainly 
are), but the men who themselves discover that which 
was unknown, and are generally deemed useless, if not 
hurtful, to their race. They will keep the sacred lamp 
burning unobserved in quiet studies, while all the 
world is gazing only at the gaslights flaring in the 
street. They will pass that lamp on from hand to 
hand, modestly, almost stealthily, till the day comes 
round again, when the obscure student shall be dis- 
covered once more to be, as he has always been, the 
strongest man on earth. For they follow a mistress 
whose footsteps may often slip, yet never fall ; for she 
walks forward on the eternal facts of Nature, which 
are the acted will of God. A giantess she is ; young 
indeed, but humble as yet : cautious and modest beyond 
her years. She is accused of trying to scale Olympus, 
by some who fancy that they have already scaled it 
themselves, and will, of course, brook no rival in their 
fancied monopoly of wisdom. 

The accusation, I believe, is unjust. And yet 
science may scale Olympus after all. Without in- 
tending it, almost without knowing it, she may find 
herself hereafter upon a summit of which she never 
dreamed ; surveying the universe of God in the light 
of Him who made it and her, and remakes them both 



234 THE ANCIEN KEGIME. [lect. in. 

for ever and ever. On that summit she may stand 
hereafter, if only she goes on, as she goes now, in 
humility and in patience ; doing the duty which lies 
nearest her; lured along the upward road, not by 
ambition, vanity, or greed, but by reverent curiosity 
for every new pebble, and flower, and child, and savage, 
around her feet. 



THE FIRST DISCOVEEY OF AMERICA. 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 



Let me begin this lecture* with a scene in the North 
Atlantic 8G3 years since. 

u Bjarne Grimolfson was blown with his ship into 
the Irish Ocean ; and there came worms and the ship 
began to sink under them. They had a boat which 
they had payed with seals' blubber, for that the sea- 
worms will not hurt. But when they got into the boat 
they saw that it would not hold them all. Then said 
Bjarne, ' As the boat will only hold the half of us, 
my advice is that we should draw lots who shall go in 
her ; for that will not be unworthy of our manhood/ 
This advice seemed so good that none gainsaid it; 
and they drew lots. And the lot fell to Bjarne that 
he should go in the boat with half his crew. But as 
he got into the boat, there spake an Icelander who 
was in the ship and had followed Bjarne from Iceland, 
' Art thou going to leave me here, Bjarne?' Quoth 
Bjarne, ' So it must be/ Then said the man, 'Another 
thing didst thou promise my father, when I sailed with 
thee from Iceland, than to desert me thus. For thou 
saidst that we both should share the same lot/ Bjarne 
said, ' And that we will not do. Get thou down into 
the boat, and I will get up into the ship, now I see 

* This lecture was delivered in America in 1&74. 



238 THE FIEST DISCOVERY OF AMEEICA. 

that thou art so greedy after life.' So Bjarne weiit up 
into the ship, and the man went down into the boat ; 
and the boat went on its voyage till they came to 
Dublin in Ireland. Most men say that Bjarne and 
his comrades perished among the worms ; for they 
were never heard of after." 

This story may serve as a text for my whole lecture. 
Not only does it smack of the sea-breeze and the salt 
Tvateiv, like all the finest old Norse sagas, but it gives 
a glimpse at least of the nobleness which underlay the 
grim and often cruel nature of the Norseman. It 
belongs, too, to the culminating epoch, to the begin- 
ning of that era when the Scandinavian peoples had 
their great times; when the old fierceness of the 
worshippers of Thor and Odin was tempered, without 
being effeminated, by the Faith of the " White Christ/' 
till the very men who had been the destroyers of 
Western Europe became its civilisers. 

It should have, moreover, a special interest to 
Americans. For — as American antiquaries are well 
aware — Bjarne was on his voyage home from the coast 
of New England ; possibly from that very Mount Hope 
Bay which seems to have borne the same name in the 
time of those old Norsemen, as afterwards in the days 
of King Philip, the last sachem of the Wampanong 
Indians. He was going back to Greenland, perhaps for 
reinforcements, finding, he and his fellow- captain, 
Thorfinn, the Esquimaux who then dwelt in that land 
too strong for them. For the Norsemen were then on 
the very edge of discovery, which might have changed 
the history not only of this continent but of Europe 
likewise. They had found and colonised Iceland and 
Greenland. They had found Labrador, and called it 
Hellnland, from its ice-polished rocks. They had 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 239 

found Nova Scotia seemingly, and called it Markland, 
from its woods. They had found New England, and 
called it Yinland the Good. A fair land they found it, 
well wooded, with good pasturage ; so that they had 
already imported cows, and a bull whose lowings 
terrified the Esquimaux. They had found self-sown 
corn too, probably maize. The streams were full of 
salmon. But they had called the land Vinland, by 
reason of its grapes. Quaint enough, and bearing in 
its very quaintness the stamp of truth, is the story of 
the first finding of the wild fox-grapes. How Leif the 
Fortunate, almost as soon as he first landed, missed a 
little wizened old German servant of his father's, 
Tyrker by name, and was much vexed thereat, for he 
had been brought up on the old man's knee, and 
hurrying off to find him met Tyrker coming back 
twisting his eyes about — a trick of his — smacking his 
lips and talking German to himself in high excitement. 
And when they get him to talk Norse again, he says : 
(C I have not been far, but I have news for you. I 
have found vines and grapes ! 9i " Is that true, foster- 
father ? " says Leif. " True it is," says the old 
German, "for I was brought up where there was 
never any lack of them.'" 

The saga — as given by Eafn — had a detailed de- 
scription of this quaint personage's appearance; and it 
would not be amiss if American wine-growers should 
employ an American sculptor — and there are great 
American sculptors — to render that description into 
marble, and set up little Tyrker in some public place, 
as the Silenus of the New World. 

Thus the first cargoes homeward from Yinland to 
Greenland had been of timber and of raisins, and of 
vine-stocks, which were not like to thrive. 



240 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

And more. Beyond Yinland the Good there was 
said to be another land, TThiteruan's Land — or Ireland 
the Mickle, as some called it. For these JSTorse traders 
from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of 
Buykjanes, supposed to have been long since drowned 
at sea, and said that the people had made him and 
Ivetla chiefs, and baptized Ari. What is all this ? and 
what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken 
in Markland told theXorthmen, of aland beyond them 
where the folk wore white clothes, and carried flags on 
poles ? Are these all dreams ? or was some part of 
that great civilisation, the relics whereof your anti- 
quarians find in so many parts of the United States, still 
in existence some 900 years ago ; and were these old 
Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it ? Be 
that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, 
some of whom seemed to have sailed far south along 
the shore, become aware that just beyond them lay a 
land of fruits and spices, gold and gems ? The adverse 
current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have 
long prevented their getting past the Bahamas into 
the Gulf of Mexico ; but, sooner or later, some storm 
must have carried a Greenland vikino- to San Domingo 
or to Cuba ; and then, as has been well said, some 
Scandinavian dynasty might have sat upon the throne 
of Mexico. 

These stories are well known to antiquarians. They 
may be found, almost all of them, in Professor Bafn's 
" Ajitiquitates Americana?.'" The action in them stands 
out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal 
evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, 
who, when he saw what seems to be, they say, the 
bluff head of Alderton at the south-east end of Boston 
Bay, said, " Here should I like to dwell/' and, shot by 



THE FIEST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 241 

an Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, 
with a cross at his head and a cross at his feet, and call 
the place Cross Ness for evermore; Gudrida, the mag- 
nificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds 
from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland 
and back, and at last, worn out and sad, goes off on a 
pilgrimage to Rome ; Helgi and Finnbogi, the Nor- 
wegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times, 
devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men 
in humour during the long winter at Hope ; and last, 
but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who, when the 
Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux 
and flee from them, as they had three weeks before 
fled from Thorfinn's bellowing bull, turns, when so 
weak that she cannot escape, single-handed on the 
savages, and catching up a slain man's sword, puts 
them all to flight with her fierce visage and fierce cries 
— Freydisa the Terrible, who, in another voyage, per- 
suades her husband to fall on Helgi and Finnbogi, 
when asleep, and murder them and all their men ; and 
then, when he will not murder the five women too, 
takes up an axe and slays them all herself, and 
getting back to Greenland, when the dark and unex- 
plained tale comes out, lives unpunished, but abhorred 
henceforth. All these folks, I say, are no phan- 
toms, but realities; at least, if I can judge of internal 
evidence. 

But beyond them, and hovering on the verge of 
My thus and Fairyland, there is a ballad called " Finn 
the Fair/' and how 

An upland Earl had twa braw sons, 

My story to begin ; 
The tane was hight Haldane the strong, 
The tither was winsome Finn. 
VOL, I. — H. E. E 



242 THE FIKST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

and so forth; which was still sung, with other "rimur/ 1 
or ballads, in the Faroes, at the end of the last century. 
Professor Rafn has inserted it, because it talks of 
Vinland as a well-known place, and because the brothers 
are sent by the princess to slay American kings ; but 
that Eiine has another value. It is of a beauty so 
perfect, and yet so like the old Scotch ballads in its 
heroic conception of love, and in all its forms and its 
qualities, that it is one proof more, to any student of 
early European poetry, that we and these old Norsemen 
are men of the same blood. 

If anything more important than istold by Professor 
Eafn and Mr. Black* be now known to the antiquarians 
of Massachusetts, let me entreat them to pardon my 
ignorance. But let me record my opinion that, though 
somewhat too much may have been made in past years 
of certain rock-inscriptions, and so forth, on this side 
of the Atlantic, there can be no reasonable doubt that 
our own race landed and tried to settle on the shore 
of New England six hundred years before their kins- 
men, and, in many cases, their actual descendants, the 
august Pilgrim Bathers of the seventeenth century. 
And so, as I said, a Scandinavian dynasty might have 
been seated now upon the throne of Mexico. And 
how was that strange chance lost ? First, of course, 
by the length and danger of the coasting voyage. It 
was one thing to have, like Columbus and Yespucci, 
Cortes and Pizarro, the Azores as a halfway port ; 
another to have Greenland, or even Iceland. It was 
one thing to run south-west upon Columbus's track, 
across the Mar de Damas, the Ladies' Sea, which hardly 
knows a storm, with the blazing blue above, the blazing 

* Black, translator of !Mallett's " Northern Antiquities," Supple, 
mentarv Chapter L, and Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanao." 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OP AMERICA. 243 

blue below, in an ever-warming climate, where every 
breath is life and joy; another to struggle against the 
fogs and icebergs, the rocks and currents of the dreary 
North Atlantic. No wonder, then, that the knowledge 
of Markland, and Yinland, and Whiteman's Land died 
away in a few generations, and became but fireside 
sagas for the winter nights. 

But there were other causes, more honourable to 
the dogged energy of the Norse. They were in those 
very years conquering and settling nearer home as no 
other people — unless, perhaps, the old Ionian Greeks 
— conquered and settled. 

Greenland, we have seen, they held — the western 
side at least — and held it long and well enough to 
afford, it is said, 2,600 pounds of walrus' teeth as 
yearly tithe to the Pope, besides Peter's pence, and 
to build many a convent, and church, and cathedral, 
with farms and homesteads round ; for one saga 
speaks of Greenland as producing wheat of the finest 
quality. All is ruined now, perhaps by gradual change 
of climate. 

But they had richer fields of enterprise than 
Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes. Their boldest 
outlaws at that very time — whether from Norway, 
Sweden, Denmark, or Britain — were forming the 
imperial life-guard of the Byzantine Emperor, as 
the once famous Varangers of Constantinople; and 
that splendid epoch of their race was just dawning, 
of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund 
Head, says so well in his preface to Viga Glum's 
Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of which this tale is 
one, were composed for the men who have left their 
mark in every corner of Europe ; and whose language 
and laws are at this moment important elements in the 

r 2 



2U THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

speech and institutions of England, America, and 
Australia. There is no page of modern history in 
which the influence of the Norsemen and their 
conquests must not be taken into account — Russia, 
Constantinople, Greece, Palestine, Sicily, the coasts 
of Africa, Southern Italy, France, the Spanish Penin- 
sula, England, Scotland, Ireland, and every rock and 
island round them, have been visited, and most of 
them at one time or the other ruled, by the men of 
Scandinavia. The motto on the sword of Roger 
Guiscard was a proud one : 

Appulus et Calaber, Siculus miki servit et Afer. 

Every island, says Sir Edmund Head, and truly — 
for the name of almost every island on the coast 
of England, Scotland, and Eastern Ireland, ends in 
either ey or ay or oe, a Norse appellative, as is the 
word " island" itself — is a mark of its haviug been, 
at some time or other, visited by the Vikings of 
Scandinavia. 

Norway, meanwhile, was convulsed by war; and 
what perhaps was of more immediate consequence, 
Svend Fork-beard, whom we Englishmen call Sweyn 
— the renegade from that Christian Faith which had 
been forced on him by his German conqueror, the 
Emperor Otto II. — with his illustrious son Cnut, 
whom we call Canute, were just calling together all 
the most daring spirits of the Baltic coasts for the 
subjugation of England; and when that great feat 
was performed, the Scandinavian emigration was 
paralysed, probably, for a time by the fearful wars 
at home. While the king of Sweden, and St. Olaf 
Tryggvason, king of Norway, were setting on Den- 
mark during Cnut's pilgrimage to Rome, and Cnut, 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 215 

sailing with a mighty fleet to Norway, was driving 
St. Olaf into Russia, to return and fall in the fratri- 
cidal battle of Stiklestead — during, strangely enough, 
a total eclipse of the sun — Vinland was like enough 
to remain still uncolonised. After Cnut's short-lived 
triumph — king as he was of Denmark, Norway, 
England, and half Scotland, and what not of Wen dish 
Folk inside the Baltic — the force of the Norsemen 
seems to have been exhausted in their native lands. 
Once more only, if I remember right, did " Lochlin," 
really and hopefully send forth her " mailed swarm " 
to conquer a foreign land; and with a result un- 
expected alike by them and by their enemies. Had 
it been otherwise, we might not have been here this 
day. 

Let me sketch for you once more — though you 
have heard it, doubtless, many a time — the tale of 
that tremendous fortnight which settled the fate of 
Britain, and therefore of North America; which 
decided — just in those great times when the decision 
was to be made — whether we should be on a par with 
the other civilised nations of Europe, like them the 
tl heirs of all the ages," with our share not only of 
Roman Christianity and Roman centralisation — a 
member of the great comity of European nations, 
held together in one Christian bond by the Pope — 
but heirs also of Roman civilisation, Roman literature, 
Roman Law ; and therefore, in due time, of Greek 
philosophy and art. No less a question than this, it 
seems to me, hung in the balance during that fort- 
night of autumn, 1066. 

Poor old Edward the Confessor, holy, weak, and 
sad, lay in his new choir of Westminster — where the 
wicked ceased from troubling, and the weary were at 



246 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OP AMERICA. 

rest. The crowned ascetic had left no heir behind. 
England seemed as a corpse, to which all the eagles 
might gather together; and the South-English, in 
their utter need, had chosen for their king the ablest, 
and it may be the justest, man in Britain — Earl 
Harold Godwinsson : himself, like half the upper 
classes of England then, of the all-dominant Norse 
blood ; for his mother was a Danish princess. Then 
out of Norway, with a mighty host, came Harold 
Hardraade, taller than all men, the ideal Yiking of 
his time. Half-brother of the now dead St. Olaf, 
severely wounded when he was but fifteen, at Stikle- 
stead, when Olaf fell, he had warred and plundered on 
many a coast. He had been away to Russia to King 
Jaroslaf; he had been in the Emperor's Varanger 
guard at Constantinople — and, it was whispered, 
had slain a lion there with his bare hands; he had 
carved his name and his comrades' in Runic cha- 
racters — if you go to Venice you may see them at this 
day — on the loins of the great marble lion, which 
stood in his time not in Venice but in Athens. And 
now, king of Norway and conqueror, for the time, of 
Denmark, why should he not take England, as Sweyn 
and Canute took it sixty years before, when the 
flower of the English gentry perished at the fatal 
battle of Assingdune ? If he and his half-barbarous 
host had conquered, the civilisation of Britain would 
have been thrown back, perhaps, for centuries. But 
it was not to be. 

England was to be conquered by the Norman; 
but by the civilised, not the barbaric ; by the Norse 
who had settled, but four generations before, in the 
North East of France under Rou, Rollo, Rolf the 
Ganger — so-called, they say, because his legs were so 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 247 

long that, when on horseback, he touched the ground 
and seemed to gang, or walk. He and his Norsemen 
had taken their share of France, and called it Nor- 
mandy to this day ; and meanwhile, with that docility 
and adaptability which marks so often truly great 
spirits, they had changed their creed, their language, 
their habits, and had become, from heathen and 
murderous Berserkers, the most truly civilised people 
of Europe, and — as was most natural then — the most 
faithful allies and servants of the Pope of Rome. So 
greatly had they changed, and so fast, that William 
Duke of Normandy, the great-great-grandson of Rolf 
the wild Viking, was perhaps the finest gentleman, as 
well as the most cultivated sovereign, and the greatest 
statesman and warrior in all Europe. 

So Harold of Norway came with all his Vikings 
to Stamford Bridge by York; and took, by coming, 
only that which Harold of England promised him, 
namely, " forasmuch as he was taller than any other 
man, seven feet of English ground. " 

The story of that great battle, told with a few 
inaccuracies, but told as only great poets tell, you 
should read, if you have not read it already, in the 
" Heimskringla " of Snorri Sturluson, the Homer of 
the North : 

High feast that day held the birds of the air and 
the beasts of the field, 
"White -tailed erne and sallow glede, 
Dnsky raven, with horny neb, 
And the gray deer the wolf of the wood. 

The bones of the slain, men say, whitened the place 
for fifty years to come. 

And remember, that on the same day on which 



248 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

that fight befell— September 27, 1066— William, Duke 
of Normandy, with all his French-speaking Norsemen, 
was sailing across the British Channel, under the 
protection of a banner consecrated by the Pope, to 
conquer that England which the Norse-speaking 
Normans could not conquer. 

And now King Harold showed himself a man. He 
turned at once from the North of England to the 
South. He raised the folk of the Southern, as he 
had raised those of the Central and Northern shires ; 
and in sixteen days — after a march which in those 
times was a prodigious feat — he was entrenched upon 
the fatal down which men called Heathfield then, 
and Senlac, but Battle to this day — with William 
and his French Normans opposite him on Telham 
hill. 

Then came the battle of Hastings. You all 
know what befell upon that day; and how the old 
weapon was matched against the new — the English 
axe against the Norman lance — and beaten only 
because the English broke their ranks. If you wish 
to refresh your memories, read the tale once more in 
Mr. Freeman's "History of England/'' or Professor 
Creasy's " Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World/' or 
even, best of all, the late Lord Lytton's splendid 
romance of "Harold." And when you go to England, 
go, as some of you may have gone already, to Battle ; 
and there from off the Abbey grounds, or from 
Mount] oye behind, look down off what was then 
"The Heathy Field," over the long slopes of green 
pasture and the rich hop-gardens, where were no hop- 
gardens then, and the flat tide-marshes winding between 
the wooded heights, towards the southern sea ; and 
imagine for yourselves the feelings of an Englishman 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 249 

as lie contemplates that broad green sloping lawn, on 
which was decided the destiny of his native land. 
Here, right beneath, rode Taillefer up the slope 
before them all, singing the song of Roland, tossing 
his lance in air and catching it as it fell, with all the 
Norse berserker spirit of his ancestors flashing out in 
him, at the thought of one fair fight, and then pur- 
gatory, or Valhalla — Taillefer perhaps preferred the 
latter. Yonder on the left, in that copse where the 
red-ochre gully runs, is Sanguelac, the drain of blood, 
into which (as the Bayeux tapestry, woven by 
Matilda's maids, still shows) the Norman knights fell, 
horse and man, till the gully was bridged with writh- 
ing bodies for those who rode after. Here, where 
you stand — the crest of the hill marks where it must 
have been — was the stockade on which depended the 
fate of England. Yonder, perhaps, stalked out one 
English squire or house-carle after another : tall men 
with long-handled battle-axes — one specially terrible, 
with a wooden helmet which no sword could pierce — 
who hewed and hewed down knight on knight, till 
they themselves were borne to earth at last. And 
here, among the trees and ruins of the garden, kept 
trim by those who know the treasure which they own, 
stood Harold's two standards of the fighting-man 
and the dragon of Wessex. And here, close by (for 
here, for many a century, stood the high altar of 
Battle Abbey, where monks sang masses for Harold's 
soul), upon this very spot the Swan-neck found her 
hero-lover's corpse. "Ah," says many an Englishman 
— and who will blame him for it — "how grand to have 
died beneath that standard on that day ! " Yes, and 
how right. And yet how right, likewise, that the 
Norman's cry of Dexaie ! — " God Help ! " — and not the 



2o0 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

English, hurrah, should have won that day, till 
William rode up Mountjoye in the afternoon to see 
the English army, terrible even in defeat, struggling 
through copse and marsh away toward Brede, and, 
like retreating lions driven into their native woods, 
slaying more in the pursuit than they slew even in 
the fight. 

But so it was to be ; for so it ought to have been. 
You, my American friends, delight, as I have said 
already, in seeing the old places of the old country. 
Go, I beg you, and look at that old place, and if you 
be wise, you will carry back from it one lesson : That 
God's thoughts are not as our thoughts; nor His 
ways as our ways. 

It was a fearful time which followed. I cannot but 
believe that our forefathers had been, in some way or 
other, great sinners, or two such conquests as Canute's 
and William's would not have fallen on them within 
the short space of sixty years. They did not want 
for courage, as Stamford Brigg and Hastings showed 
full well. English swine, their Norman conquerors 
called them often enough; but never English cowards. 
Their ruinous vice, if we are to trust the records of the 
time, was what the old monks called accidia — atciqhia — 
and ranked it as one of the seven deadly sins : a 
general careless, sleepy, comfortable habit of mind, 
which lets all go its way for good or evil — a habit of 
mind too often accompanied, as in the case of the Anglo- 
Danes, with self-indulgence, often coarse enough. Huge 
eaters and huger drinkers, fuddled with ale, were the 
men who went down at Hastings — though they went 
down like heroes — before the staid and sober Norman 
out of France. 

But those were fearful times. As long as William 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OP AMERICA. 251 

lived, ruthless as he was to all rebels, lie kept order 
and did justice with a strong and steady hand ; for he 
brought with him from Normandy the instincts of a 
truly great statesman. And in his sons' time matters 
grew worse and worse. After that, in the troubles of 
Stephen's reign, anarchy let loose tyranny in its most 
fearful form, and things were done which recall the 
cruelties of the old Spanish conquist adores in America. 
Scott's charming romance of " Ivanhoe " must be 
taken, I fear, as a too true picture of English society 
in the time of Kichard I. 

Arid what came of it all ? What was the result of 
all this misery and wrong ? 

This, paradoxical as it may seem : That the Norman 
conquest was the making of the English people ; of 
the Free Commons of England. 

Paradoxical, but true. First, you must dismiss 
from your minds the too common notion that there is 
now, in England, a governing Norman aristocracy, or 
that there has been one, at least since the year 1215, 
when Magna Charta was won from the Norman John 
by Normans and by English alike. For the first victors 
at Hastings, like the first conquistadores in America, 
perished, as the monk chronicles point out, rapidly by 
their own crimes ; and very few of our nobility can 
trace their names back to the authentic Battle Abbey 
roll. The great majority of the peers have sprung 
from, and all have intermarried with, the Commons ; 
and the peerage has been from the first, and has 
become more and more as centuries have rolled on, 
the prize of success in life. 

The cause is plain. The conquest of England by 
the Normans was not one of those conquests of a 
savage by a civilised race, or of a cowardly race by a 



252 THE FIEST DISCOVERY OF AMEEICA. 

brave race, which results in the slavery of the con- 
quered, and leaves the gulf of caste between two 
races — master and slave. That was the case in France, 
and resulted, after centuries of oppression, in the 
great and dreadful revolution of 1793, which con- 
vulsed not only France but the whole civilised world. 
But caste, thank God, has never existed in England, 
since at least the first generation after the Norman 
conquest. 

The vast majority, all but the whole population of 
England, have been always free ; and free, as they are 
not where caste exists to change their occupations. 
They could intermarry, if they were able men, into 
the ranks above them ; as they could sink, if they were 
unable men, into the ranks below them. Any man 
acquainted with the origin of our English surnames 
may verify this fact for himself, by looking at the 
names of a single parish or a single street of shops. 
There, jumbled together, he will find names marking 
the noblest Saxon or Angle blood — Kenward or Kenric, 
Osgood or Osborne, side by side with Cordery or 
Banister — now names of farmers in my own parish — 
or other Nornian-Frenck names which may be, like 
those two last, in Battle Abbey roll — and side by side 
the almost ubiquitous Brown, whose ancestor was 
probably some Danish or Norwegian house-carle, proud 
of his name Biorn the Bear, and the ubiquitous Smith 
or Smythe, the Smiter, whose forefather, whether he 
be now peasant or peer, assuredly handled the tongs 
and hammer at his own forge. This holds true equally 
in New England and in Old. TVhen I search through 
(as I delight to do) your New England surnames, I 
find the same jumble of names — "West Saxon, Angle, 
Danish, Norman, and French-Norman likewise, many 



THE FIEST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 253 

of primeeval and heathen antiquity, many of high 
nobility, all worked together, as at home, to form the 
Free Commoners of England. 

If any should wish to know more on this curious 
and important subject, let me recommend them to 
study Ferguson's " Teutonic Name System," a book 
from which you will discover that some of our quaintest, 
and seemingly most plebeian surnames — many sur- 
names, too, which are extinct in England, but remain 
in America — are really corruptions of good old Teu- 
tonic names, which our ancestors may have carried 
in the German Forest, before an Englishman set foot 
on British soil ; from which he will rise with the 
comfortable feeling that we English-speaking men, 
from the highest to the lowest, are literally kinsmen. 
Nay, so utterly made up now is the old blood-feud 
between Norseman and Englishman, between the 
descendants of those who conquered and those who 
were conquered, that in the children of our Prince 
of Wales, after 800 years, the blood of William of 
Normandy is mingled with the blood of the very 
Harold who fell at Hastings. And so, by the bitter 
woes which followed the Norman conquest was the 
whole population, Dane, Angle, and Saxon, earl and 
churl, freeman and slave, crushed and welded together 
into one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful 
towards each other by the most wholesome of all 
teachings, a community of suffering ; and if they had 
been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual people, 
were taught 

That life is not as idle ore, 
But heated hot with burning fears, 
And bathed in baths of hissing tears, 
And battered with the strokes of doom 
To shape and use. 



254 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

But how did these wild Vikings become Christian 
men ? It is a long story. So stanch a race was sure 
to be converted only very slowly. Noble missionaries 
as Ansgar, Rembert, and Poppo, had worked for 150 
years and more among the heathens of Denmark. 
But the patriotism of the Norseman always recoiled, 
even though in secret, from the fact that they were 
German monks, backed by the authority of the German 
emperor; and many a man, like Svend Fork-beard, 
father of the great Canute, though he had the Kaiser 
himself for godfather, turned heathen once more the 
moment he was free, because his baptism was the 
badge of foreign conquest, and neither pope nor 
kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, 
indeed, forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword's 
point, often by horrid cruelties, and perished in the 
attempt. But who forced it on the Norsemen of 
Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all 
the Eastern Baltic ? It was absorbed and in most 
cases, I believe, gradually and willingly, as a gospel and 
good news to hearts worn out with the storm of their 
own passions. And whence came their Christianity ? 
Much of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still 
more of the French Normans, came direct from Rome, 
the city which, let them defy its influence as they would, 
was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all 
civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came 
from that mysterious ancient Western Church, the 
Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget, St. Columba, which 
had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky 
islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. 
Even to Iceland ; for when that island was first 
discovered, about a.d. 840, the Norsemen found in 
an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 255 

books and hells and wooden crosses, and named that 
island Papey, the isle of the popes — some little colony 
of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are said to 
have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. 
Let us believe, for it is consonant with reason and 
experience, that the sight of those poor monks, 
plundered and massacred again and again by the 
iC mailed swarms of Lochlin," yet never exterminated, 
but springing up again in the same place, ready for 
fresh massacre, a sacred plant which God had planted, 
and which no rage of man could trample out — let us 
believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the 
buccaneers of the old world that there was a purer 
manliness, a loftier heroism, than the ferocious self- 
assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of 
humility, gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice; that 
there was a strength which was made perfect in 
weakness ; a glory, not of the sword but of the cross. 
We will believe that that was the lesson which 
the Norsemen learnt, after many a wild and blood- 
stained voyage, from the monks of Iona or of Derry, 
which caused the building of such churches as that 
which Sightrys', king of Dublin, raised about the 
year 1030, not in the Norse but in the Irish quarter 
of Dublin : a sacred token of amity between the new 
settlers and the natives on the ground of a common 
faith. Let us believe, too, that the influence of 
woman was not wanting in the good work — that the 
story of St. Margaret and Malcolm Canmore was 
repeated, though inversely, in the case of many a 
heathen Scandinavian jarl, who, marrying the princely 
daughter of some Scottish chieftain, found in her 
creed at last something more precious than herself ; 
while his brother or his cousin became, at Dublin or 



256 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

Wexford or Waterford, the husband of some saffron- 
robed Irish princess, ' ' fair as an elf," as the old saying 
was ; some " maiden of the three transcendent hues/' 
of whom the old book of Linane says : 

Bed as the blood which flowed from stricken deer, 
White as the snow on which that blood ran down, 
Black as the raven who drank up that blood ; 

— and possibly, as in the case of Brian Boru's mother, 
had given his fair-haired sister in marriage to some 
Irish prince, and could not resist the spell of their new 
creed, and the spell too, it may be, of some sister of 
theirs who had long given up all thought of earthly 
marriage to tend the undying fire of St. Bridget 
among the consecrated virgins of Kildare. 

I am not drawing from mere imagination. That 
such things must have happened, and happened again 
and again, is certain to anyone who knows, even 
superficially, the documents of that time. And I 
doubt not that, in manners as well as in religion, the 
Norse were humanised and civilised by their contact 
with the Celts, both in Scotland and in Ireland. Both 
peoples had valour, intellect, imagination : but the Celt 
had that which the burly angular Norse character, 
however deep and stately, and however humorous, 
wanted; namely, music of nature, tenderness, grace, 
rapidity, playfulness; just the qualities, combining 
with the Scandinavian (and in Scotland with the 
Angle) elements of character which have produced, in 
Ireland and in Scotland, two schools of lyric poetry 
second to none in the world. 

And so they were converted to what was then a 
dark and awful creed ; a creed of ascetic self-torture 
and purgatorial fires for those who escape the still 



THE FIEST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 25* 

more dreadful, because endless, doom of the rest of 
the human race. But, because it was a sad creed, 
it suited better, men who had, when conscience re- 
awakened in them, but too good reason to be sad ; 
and the minsters and cloisters which sprang up over 
the whole of Northern Europe, and even beyond it, 
along the dreary western shores of Greenland itself, are 
the symbols of a splendid repentance for their own 
sins and for the sins of their forefathers. 

Gudruna herself, of whom I spoke just now, one 
of those old Norse heroines who helped to discover 
America, though a historic personage, is a symbolic 
one likewise, and the pattern of a whole class. She, 
too, after many journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and 
Winland, goes on a pilgrimage to Rome, to get, I 
presume, absolution from the Pope himself for all the 
sins of her strange, rich, stormy, wayward life. 

Have you not read — many of you surely have — 
La Motte Fouque's romance of ll Sintram ? " It 
embodies all that I would say. It is the spiritual 
drama of that early Middle Age ; very sad, morbid if 
you will, but true to fact. The Lady Yerena ought 
not, perhaps, to desert her husband, and shut herself 
tip in a cloister. But so she would have done in 
those old days. And who shall judge her harshly for 
so doing? When the brutality of the man seems 
past all cure, who shall blame the woman if she 
glides away into some atmosphere of peace and 
purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings nor 
caresses will amend ? It is a sad book, " Sintram." 
And yet not too sad. For they were a sad people, those 
old Norse forefathers of ours. Their Christianity was 
sad ; their minsters sad ; there are few sadder, though 
few grander, buildings than a Norman church. 
vol. i. — H. e. 8 



258 THE FIKST DISOOYEEY OF AMEEICA. 

And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make 
them sad. It was but the other and the healthier 
side of that sadness which they had as heathens. 
Eead which you will of the old sagas — heathen or 
half- Christian — the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt 
Niall, Grettir the Strong, and, above all, Snorri Stur- 
luson's ( c Heimskringla " itself — and you will see at 
once how sad they are. There is, in the old sagas, 
none of that enjoyment of life which shines out 
everywhere in Greek poetry, even through its deepest 
tragedies. Not in complacency with Nature's beauty, 
but in the fierce struggle with her wrath, does the 
Norseman feel pleasure. Nature to him was not, as 
in Mr. Longfellow's exquisite poem,* the kind old 
nurse, to take him on her knee and whisper to him, 
ever anew, the story without an end. She was a 
weird witch-wife, mother of storm demons and frost 
giants, who must be fought with steadily, warily, 
wearily, over dreary heaths and snow-capped fells, 
and rugged nesses and tossing sounds, and away into 
the boundless sea — or who could live ? — till he got 
hardened in the fight into ruthlessness of need and 
greed. The poor strip of flat strath, ploughed and 
re-ploughed again in the short summer days, would 
yield no more ; or wet harvests spoiled the crops, or 
heavy snows starved the cattle. And so the Norse- 
man launched his ships when the lands were sown in 
spring, and went forth to pillage or to trade, as luck 
would have, to summerted, as he himself called it ; 
and came back, if he ever came, in autumn to the 
women to help at harvest-time, with blood upon his 
hand. But had he stayed at home, blood would have 
been there still. Three out of four of them had been 

* On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz. 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OP AMERICA. 259 

mixed up in some man -slaying, or had some blood-feud 
to avenge among their own kin. 

The whole of Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, 
Norway, Orkney, and the rest, remind me ever of that 
terrible picture of the great Norse painter, Tiptdeman, 
in which two splendid youths, lashed together, in true 
Norse duel fashion by the waist, are hewing each other 
to death with the short axe, about some hot words 
over their ale. The loss of life, and that of the most 
gallant of the young, in those days must have been 
enormous. If the vitality of the race had not been 
even more enormous, they must have destroyed each 
other, as the Red Indians have done, off the face of 
the earth. They lived these Norsemen, not to live — 
they lived to die. For what cared they ? Death — 
what was death to them ? what it was to the Joms- 
burger Viking, who, when led out to execution, said to 
the headsman : ' ' Die ! with all pleasure. We used to 
question in Jomsburg whether a man felt when his 
head was off ? Now I shall know ; but if I do, take 
care, for I shall smite thee with my knife. And mean- 
while, spoil not this long hair of mine ; it is so beautiful." 

But, oh ! what waste ! What might not these men 
have done if they had sought peace, not war ; if they 
had learned a few centuries sooner to do justly, and 
love mercy, and walk humbly with their God ? 

And yet one loves them, blood-stained as they are. 
Your own poets, men brought up under circumstances, 
under ideas the most opposite to theirs, love them, 
and cannot help it. And why? It is not merely 
for their bold daring, it is not merely for their 
stern endurance; nor again that they had in them 
that shift and thrift, those steady and common- 
sense business habits, which made their noblest men 

s 2 



-€• 



260 THE TIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

not ashamed to go on voyages of merchandise. Nor 
is it, again, that grim humour — humour as of the 
modern Scotch — which so often flashes out into an 
actual jest, but more usually underlies unspoken all 
their deeds. Is it not rather that these men are our 
forefathers ? that their blood runs in the veins of 
perhaps three men out of four in any general assembly, 
whether in America or in Britain ? Startling as the 
assertion may be, I believe it to be strictly true. 

Be that as it may, I cannot read the stories of 
your western men, the writings of Bret Harte, or 
Colonel John Hay, for instance, without feeling at 
every turn that there are the old Norse alive again, 
beyond the very ocean which they first crossed, 850 
years ago. 

Let me try to prove my point, and end with a 
story, as I began with one. 

It is just thirty years before the Norman conquest 
of England, the evening of the battle of Sticklestead. 
St. Olafs corpse is still lying unburied on the hillside. 
The reforming and Christian king has fallen in the 
attempt to force Christianity and despotism on the 
Conservative and half -heathen party — the free bonders 
or yeoman-farmers of Norway. Thormod, his poet — 
the man, as his name means, of thunder mood — who 
has been standing in the ranks, at last has an arrow 
in his left side. He breaks off the shaft, and thus sore 
wounded goes up, when all is lost, to a farm where 
is a great barn full of wounded. One Kimbe comes, 
a man out of the opposite or bonder part. " There is 
great howling and screaming in there," he says. 
" King Olaf 's men fought bravely enough : but it is a 
shame brisk young lads cannot bear their wounds. 
On what side wert thou in the fight ? " t( On the best 
side," says the beaten Thormod. Kimbe sees that 



THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 261 

Thormod lias a good bracelet on his arm. u Thou art 
surely a king's man. Give me thy gold ring and I 
will hide thee, ere the bonders kill thee." 

Thormod said, u Take it, if thou canst get it. I 
have lost that which is worth more ; " and he stretched 
out his left hand, and Kimbe tried to take it. But 
Thormod, swinging his sword, cut off his hand ; and it 
is said Kimbe behaved no better over his wound than 
those he had been blaming. 

Then Thormod went into the barn ; and after he 
had sung his song there in praise of his dead king, he 
went into an inner room, where was a fire, and water 
warming, and a handsome girl binding up men's 
wounds. And he sat down by the door; and one 
said to him, " Why art thou so dead pale ? Why dost 
thou not call for the leech ? " Then sung Thormod : 

" I am not blooming ; and the fair 
And slender maiden loves to care 
For blooming yonths. Few care for me, 
"With Fenri's gold meal I can't fee ; " 

and so forth, improvising after the old Norse fashion. 
Then Thormod got up and went to the fire, and 
stood and warmed himself. And the nurse-girl said 
to him, " Go out, man, and bring some of the split- 
firewood which lies outside the door.-" He went out 
and brought an armful of wood and threw it down. 
Then the nurse-girl looked him in the face, and said, 
" Dreadful pale is this man. Why art thou so ? " 
Then sang Thormod : 

" Thou wonderest, sweet bloom, at me, 
A man so hideous to see. 
The arrow-drift o'ertook me, girl, 
A fine-ground arrow in the whirl 
"Went through me, and I feel the dart 
Sits, lovely lass, too near my heart." 



262 THE FIRST DISCOVERY OF AMEEICA. 

The girl said, "Let me see thy wound." Then 
Thormod sat down, and the girl saw his wounds, and 
that which was in his side, and saw that there was a 
piece of iron in it; but could not tell where it had 
gone. In a stone pot she had leeks and other herbs, 
and boiled them, and gave the wounded man of it to 
eat. But Thormod said, " Take it away ; I have no 
appetite now for my broth.-" Then she took a great 
pair of tongs and tried to pull out the iron ; but the 
wound was swelled, and there was too little to lay hold 
of. Now said Thormod, " Cut in so deep that thou 
canst get at the iron, and give me the tongs." She did 
as he said. Then cook Thormod the gold bracelet off 
his hand and gave it the nurse-girl, and bade her do 
with it what she liked. 

1 c It is a good man's gift," said he. " King Olaf 
gave me the ring this morning." 

Then Thormod took the tongs and pulled the iron 
out. But on the iron was a barb, on which hung flesh 
from the heart, some red, some white. When he saw 
that, he said, " The king has fed us well. I am fat, 
even to the heart's roots." And so leant back and 
was dead. 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD.* 



I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old 
despotic empires which were in every case the earliest 
known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play 
the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some 
corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and 
ridiculous by its decay — as did at last the Eoman and 
then the Byzantine Empire — and, after raising a laugh 
at the expense of the old system say : See what a 
superior people you are now — how impossible, under 
free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base 
and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France 
before the Kevolution of 1793. Well, that would be 
on the whole true, thank God ; but what need is there 
to say it ? 

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, 
our blame for our own sins, certain that we shall gain 
more instruction, though not more amusement, by 
hunting out the good which is in anything than 
by hunting out its evil. I have chosen, not the 
worst, but the best despotism which I could find in 
history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, 
* This lecture was given in America in 1874. 



266 CYRUS. THE SERVANT OF THE LOKD. 

one whose name has become a proverb and a legend, 
that so I might lift up your ininds, even by the con- 
templation of an old Eastern empire,, to see that it, 
too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its 
hero the servant of the Lord. For we are almost 
bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian 
Empire, by this august title for two reasons — First, 
because the Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, 
because he proved himself to be such by his actions 
and their consequences — at least in the eyes of those 
who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching 
Providence, by which all human history is 

Bound by gold chains nnto the throne of God. 

His work was very different from any that need be 
done, or can be done, in these our days. But while 
we thank God that such work is now as unnecessary 
as impossible ; we may thank God likewise that, when 
such work was necessary and possible, a man was 
raised up to do it : and to do it, as all accounts assert, 
better, perhaps, than it had ever been done before or 
since. 

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation 
after nation, tribe after tribe, and founded empires on 
their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be replaced, 
throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, 
by free self-governed peoples : 

The old order changeth, giving place to the new; 

And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 

And that custom of conquest and empire and trans- 
plantation did more than once corrupt the world. And 
yet in it, too, God may have more than once fulfilled 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 267 

His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be 
believed, in Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the 
founder of the Persian Empire some 2400 years ago. 
For these empires, it must be remembered, did at 
least that which the Eoman Empire did among a 
scattered number of savage tribes, or separate little 
races, hating and murdering each other, speaking 
different tongues, and worshipping different gods, 
and losing utterly the sense of a common humanity, 
till they looked on the people who dwelt in the next 
valley as fiends, to be sacrificed, if caught, to their 
own fiends at home. Among such as these, empires 
did introduce order, law, common speech, common 
interest, the notion of nationality and humanity. 
They, as it were, hammered together the fragments of 
the human race till they had moulded them into one. 
They did it cruelly, clumsily, ill : but was there ever 
work done on earth, however noble, which was not — 
alas, alas ! — done somewhat ill ? 

Let me talk to you a little about the old hero. 
He and his hardy Persians should be specially inte- 
resting to us. For in them first does our race, the 
Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them 
first did our race give promise of being the conquering 
and civilising race of the future world. And to the 
conquests of Cyrus — so strangely are all great times 
and great movements of the human family linked 
to each other — to his conquests, humanly speaking, is 
owing the fact that you are here, and I am speaking 
to you at this moment. 

It is an oft-told story : but so grand a one that I 
must sketch it for you, however clumsily, once more. 

In that mountain province called Farsistan, north- 
east of what we now call Persia, the dwelling-place of 



268 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

the Persians, there dwelt, in the sixth and seventh 
centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest 
blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, 
Teutonic, Greek, and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue 
akin to theirs. They had wandered thither, say their 
legends, out of the far north-east, from off some lofty 
plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing 
cold, which left them but two months of summer to 
ten of winter. 

They despised at first — would that they had despised 
always ! — the luxurious life of the dwellers in the 
plains, and the effeminate customs of the Medes — a 
branch of their own race who had conquered and 
intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes ; 
and adopted much of their creed, as well as of their 
morals, throughout their vast but short-lived Median 
Empire. " Soft countries/'' said Cyrus himself — so 
runs the tale — " gave birth to small men. No region 
produced at once delightful fruits and men of a war- 
like spirit.'" Letters were to them, probably, then 
unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as 
they borrowed their art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, 
and other Semitic nations whom they conquered. 
From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads 
were instructed but in two things — to speak the truth 
and to shoot with the bow. To ride was the third 
necessary art, introduced, according to Xenophon, after 
they had descended from their mountain fastnesses to 
conquer the whole East. 

Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda — 
Ormuzd, as he has been called since — was the one 
eternal Creator, the source of all light and life and 
good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the 
creation of heaven, before the water, before the earthy 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OP THE LORD. 269 

before the cow, before the tree, before the fire, before 
man the truthful, before the Devas and beasts of prey, 
before the whole existing universe ; before every good 
thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from 
Truth. 

He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be 
worshipped only with prayers, with offerings of the 
inspiring juice of the now unknown herb Homa, and 
by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, under- 
stand, was not he, but the symbol — as was light and 
the sun — of the good spirit — of Ahura Mazda. They 
had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no 
temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered 
the use of them a sign of folly. They were, as has 
been well said of them, the Puritans of the old world. 
When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, 
they became the iconoclasts of the old world ; and the 
later Isaiah, out of the depths of national shame, 
captivity, and exile, saw in them brother-spirits, the 
chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was 
holding by His right hand, till all the foul superstitions 
and foul effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of 
the East, and even of Egypt itself, should be crushed, 
though, alas ! only for awhile, by men who felt that 
they had a commission from the Grod of light and 
truth and purity, to sweep out all that with the besom 
of destruction. 

But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and 
it may be happier, times the duty of the good man 
was to strive against all evil, disorder, uselessness, 
incompetence in their more simple forms. " He there- 
fore is a holy man," says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, 
" who has built a dwelling on the earth, in which he 
maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children, and flocks 



270 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

and herds ; lie who makes the earth produce barley, 
he who cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates 
purity ; he advances the law of Ahura Mazda as much 
as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.-" 

To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a 
corner of the earth better than they found it, was to 
these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd' s world out of 
the usurped dominion of Ahriman ; to rescue it from 
the spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, 
the Spirit of Order and of Good. 

For they believed in an evil spirit, these old 
Persians. Evil was not for them a lower form of 
good. With their intense sense of the difference be- 
tween right and wrong it could be nothing less than 
hateful ; to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal 
enemy, till it became to them at last impersonate and 
a person. 

Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily 
on them and on their great prophet, Zoroaster — 
splendour of gold, as I am told his name signifies — 
who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly 
where, but who lived and lives for ever, for his works 
follow him. He, too, tried to solve for his people the 
mystery of evil ; and if he did not succeed, who has 
succeeded yet ? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura 
Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the 
being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned being. He 
was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of 
Ormuzd alike in nature and in man. He was the 
cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of 
misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as 
Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of 
the purer and older Zoroastrian creed. With it, if 
Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be 



CYRUS, THE SEEVANT OF THE LORD. 271 

eternal in the future. Somehow, soniewhen, some- 
where, in the day when three prophets — the increasing 
Kght, the increasing truth, and the existing truth — 
should arise and give to mankind the last three books 
of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the 
pure creed, then evil should be conquered, the creation 
become pure again, and Ahriman vanish for ever; 
and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly 
for Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all 
his works. 

Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth 
and draw the bow, what might they not do when the 
hour and the man arrived ? They were not a big 
nation. No ; but they were a great nation, even while 
they were eating barley-bread and paying tribute to 
their conquerors the Medes, in the sterile valleys of 
Farsistan. 

And at last the hour and the man came. The 
story is half legendary — differently told by different 
authors. Herodotus has one tale, Xenophon another. 
The first, at least, had ample means of information. 
Astyages is the old shah of the Median Empire, then 
at the height of its seeming might and splendour 
and effeminacy. He has married his daughter, the 
Princess Mandane, to Cambyses, seemingly a vassal- 
king or prince of the pure Persian blood. One night 
the old man is troubled with a dream. He sees a vine 
spring from his daughter, which overshadows all Asia. 
He sends for the Magi to interpret ; and they tell him 
that Mandane will have a son who will reign in his 
stead. Having sons of his own, and fearing for the 
succession, he sends for Mandane, and, when her child 
is born, gives it to Harpagus, one of his courtiers, to 
be slain. The courtier relents, and hands it over to a 



272 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

herdsman, to be exposed on the mountains. The 
herdsman relents in turn, and brings the babe up as 
his own child. 

When the boy, who goes by the name of Agradates, 
is grown, he is at play with the other herdboys, and 
they choose him for a mimic king. Some he makes 
his guards, some he bids build houses, some carry his 
messages. The son of a Mede of rank refuses, and 
Agradates has him seized by his guards and chastised 
with the whip. The ancestral instincts of command 
and discipline are showing early in the lad. 

The young gentleman complains to his father, the 
father to the old king, who of course sends for the 
herdsman and his boy. The boy answers in a tone so 
exactly like that in which Xenophon's Cyrus would 
have answered, that I must believe that both Xeno- 
phon's Cyrus and Herodotus's Cyrus (like Xenophon's 
Socrates and Plato's Socrates) are real pictures of a 
real character; and that Herodotus' s story, though 
Xenophon says nothing of it, is true. 

He has done nothing, the noble boy says, but what 
was just. He had been chosen king- in play, because 
the boys thought him most fit. The boy whom he had 
chastised was one of those who chose him. All the 
rest obeyed : but he would not, till at last he got his 
due reward. "If I deserve punishment for that," 
says the boy, " I am ready to submit." 

The old king looks keenly and wonderingly at the 
young king, whose features seem somewhat like his 
own. Likely enough in those days, when an Iranian 
noble or prince would have a quite different cast of 
complexion and of face from a Turanian herdsman. A 
suspicion crosses him; and by threats of torture he 
gets the truth from the trembling herdsman. 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 273 

To the poor wretch's rapture the old king lets him 
go unharmed. He has a more exquisite revenge to 
take, and sends for Harpagus, who likewise confesses 
the truth. The wily old tyrant has naught but gentle 
words. It is best as it is. He has been very sorry 
himself for the child, and Mandane's reproaches had 
gone to his heart. " Let Harpagus go home and send 
his son to be a companion to the new-found prince. 
To-night there will be great sacrifices in honour of the 
child's safety, and Harpagus is to be a guest at the 
banquet.-" 

Harpagus comes ; and after eating his fill, is asked 
how he like3 the king's meat ? He gives the usual 
answer ; and a covered basket is put before him, out 
of which he is to take — in Median fashion — what 
he likes. He finds in it the head and hands and 
feet of his own son. Like a true Eastern he shows 
no signs of horror. The king asks him if he knew 
what flesh he had been eating. He answers that he 
knew perfectly. That whatever the king did pleased 
him. 

Like an Eastern courtier, he knew how to dis- 
semble, but not to forgive, and bided his time. The 
Magi, to their credit, told Astyages that his dream had 
been fulfilled, that Cyrus — as we must now call the 
foundling prince — had fulfilled it by becoming a king 
in play, and the boy is let to go back to his father and 
his hardy Persian life. But Harpagus does not leave 
him alone, nor perhaps, do his own thoughts. He has 
wrongs to avenge on his grandfather. And it seems 
not altogether impossible to the young mountaineer. 

He has seen enough of Median luxury to despise 
it and those who indulge in it. He has seen his own 
grandfather with his cheeks rouged, his eyelids stained 
VOL. I. — h. E. I 



274 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

with antimony, living a womanlike life, shut up from 
all his subjects in the recesses of a vast seraglio. 

He calls together the mountain rulers; makes 
friends with Tigranes, an Armenian prince, a vassal 
of the Mede, who has his wrongs likewise to avenge. 
And the two little armies of foot- soldiers — the Persians 
had no cavalry — defeat the innumerable horsemen of 
the Mede, take the old king, keep him in honourable 
captivity, and so change, one legend says, in a single 
battle, the fortunes of the whole East. 

And then begins that series of conquests of which 
we know hardly anything, save the fact that they 
were made. The young mountaineer and his play- 
mates, whom he makes his generals and satraps, 
sweep onward towards the West, teaching their men 
the art of riding, till the Persian cavalry becomes 
more famous than the Median had been. They gather 
to them, as a snowball gathers in rolling, the picked 
youth of every tribe whom they overcome. They 
knit these tribes to them in loyalty and affection by 
that righteousness — that truthfulness and justice — 
for which Isaiah in his grandest lyric strains has made 
them illustrious to all time; which Xenophon has 
celebrated in like manner in that exquisite book of 
his — the " Cyropasdia." The great Lydian kingdom 
of Croesus — Asia Minor as we call it now — goes down 
before them. Babylon itself goes down, after that 
world-famed siege which ended in Belshazzar's feast ; 
and when Cyrus died — still in the prime of life, the 
legends seem to say — he left a coherent and well- 
organised empire, which stretched from the Mediter- 
ranean to Hindostan. 

So runs the tale, which to me, I confess, sounds 
probable and rational enough. It may not do so to 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OP THE LORD. 275 

you ; for it has not to many learned men. They are 
inclined to " relegate it into the region of myth ; " in 
plain English,, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least 
a dupe. What means those wise men can have at 
this distance of more than 2000 years, of knowing 
more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived 
within 100 years of Cyrus, I for myself cannot dis- 
cover. And I say this without the least wish to 
disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are 
— and more there ought to be, as long as lies and 
superstitions remain on this earth — a class of thinkers 
who hold in just suspicion all stories which savour of 
the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. 
They know the terrible uses to which appeals to the 
fancy and the emotions have been applied, and are 
still applied to enslave the intellects, the consciences, 
the very bodies of men and women. They dread so 
much from experience the abuse of that formula, that 
" a thing is so beautiful it must be true," that they are 
inclined to reply : " Rather let us say boldly, it is so 
beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or 
even refuse to believe a priori, and at first sight, all 
startling, sensational, even poetic tales, and accept 
nothing as history, which is not as dull as the ledger 
of a dry-goods' store." But I think that experience, 
both in nature and in society, are against that ditch- 
water philosophy. The weather, being governed by 
laws, ought always to be equable and normal, and yet 
you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms. The 
share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be 
always equable and normal, and yet you have startling 
transactions, startling panics, startling disclosures, 
and a whole sensational romance of commercial crime 
and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, 

t 2 



276 CYJ1US, THE SERVANT OF THE LOKD. 

without having witnessed in private life sensation 
tragedies, alas ! sometimes too fearful to be told, or 
at least sensational romances, which we shall take 
care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? 
Let the ditch-water philosophy say what it will, human 
life is not a ditch, but a wild and roaring river, flood- 
ing its banks, and eating out new channels with many 
a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange 
animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common- 
place motives ; but, for that reason, ready and glad 
at times to escape from them and their dulness and 
baseness ; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild 
freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe 
says, underlies his nature and all nature ; and to prefer 
for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch- 
water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on 
fire-water, let the consequences be what they may. 

How else shall we explain such a phenomenon as 
those old crusades ? Were they undertaken for any 
purpose, commercial or other? Certainly not for 
lightening an overburdened population. Nay, is not 
the history of your own Mormons, and their exodus 
into the far West, one of the most startling instances 
which the world has seen for several centuries, of the 
unexpected and incalculable forces which lie hid in 
man ? Believe me, man's passions, heated to igniting 
point, rather than his prudence cooled down to freez- 
ing point, are the normal causes of all great human 
movement. And a truer law of social science than 
any that political economists are wont to lay down, is 
that old Dov' e la donna ? of the Italian judge, who 
used to ask, as a preliminary to every case, civil or 
criminal, which was brought before him, Dov 3 e la 
donna ? " Where is the lady?" certain, like a wise 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 277 

old gentleman, that a woman was most probably at 
the bottom of the matter. 

Strangeness ? Komance ? Did any of you ever 
read — if you have not you should read — Archbishop 
Whately's "Historic Doubts about the Emperor 
Napoleon the First v ? Therein the learned and witty 
Archbishop proved, as early as 1819, by fair use of the 
criticism of Mr. Hume and the Sceptic School, that 
the whole history of the great Napoleon ought to be 
treated by wise men as a myth and a romance, that 
there is little or no evidence of his having existed at 
all ; and that the story of his strange successes and 
strange defeats was probably invented by our Govern- 
ment in order to pander to the vanity of the English 
nation. 

I will say this, which Archbishop Whately, in a 
late edition, foreshadows, wittily enough — that if one 
or two thousand years hence, when the history of the 
late Emperor Napoleon the Third, his rise and fall, 
shall come to be subjected to critical analysis by future 
Philistine historians of New Zealand or Australia, 
it will be proved by them to be utterly mythical, 
incredible, monstrous — and that all the more, the 
more the actual facts remain to puzzle their unimagi- 
native brains. What will they make two thousand 
years hence, of the landing at Boulogne with the 
tame eagle ? Will not that, and stranger facts still, 
but just as true, be relegated to the region of myth, 
with the dream of Astyages, and the young and 
princely herdsman playing at king over his fellow- 
slaves ? 

But enough of this. To me these bits of romance 
often seem the truest, as well as the most important 
portions of history. 



278 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

When old Herodotus tells me how, King Astyages 
having guarded the frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter 
to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed hare, telling him 
to open it in private ; and how, sewn up in it was the 
letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I 
am inclined to say, That must be true. It is so beneath 
the dignity of history, so quaint and unexpected, that 
it is all the more likely not to have been invented. 

So with that other story — How young Cyrus, 
giving out that his grandfather had made him general 
of the Persians, summoned them all, each man with a 
sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns, and 
bade them clear it in one day ; and how when they, 
like loyal men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and 
next day he took them into a great meadow and 
feasted them with corn and wine, and all that his 
father's farm would yield, and asked them which day 
they liked best ; and, when they answered as was to 
be expected, how he opened his parable and told 
them, e( Choose, then, to work for the Persians like 
slaves, or to be free with me." 

Such a tale sounds to me true. It has the very 
savour of the parables of the Old Testament; as 
have, surely, the dreams of the old Sultan, with which 
the tale begins. Do they not put us in mind of the 
dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, in the Book of Daniel ? 

Such stories are actually so beautiful that they are 
very likely to be true. Understand me, I only say 
likely; the ditch-water view of history is not all 
wrong. Its advocates are right in saying great 
historic changes are not produced simply by one great 
person, by one remarkable event. They have been 
preparing, perhaps for centuries. They are the result 
of numberless forces, acting according to laws, which 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OP THE LORD. 279 

might have been foreseen, and will be foreseen, when 
the science of History is more perfectly understood. 

For instance, Cyrus could not have conquered the 
Median Empire at a single blow, if first that empire 
had not been utterly rotten; and next, if he and 
his handful of Persians had not been tempered and 
sharpened, by long hardihood, to the finest cutting 
edge. 

Yes, there were all the materials for the catas- 
trophe — the cannon, the powder, the shot. But to 
say that the Persians must have conquered the Medes, 
even if Cyrus had never lived, is to say, as too many 
philosophers seem to me to say, that, given cannon, 
powder, and shot, it will fire itself off some day if 
we only leave it alone long enough. 

It may be so. But our usual experience of Nature 
and Fact is, that spontaneous combustion is a rare and 
exceptional phenomenon; that if a cannon is to be 
fired, someone must arise and pull the trigger. And 
I believe that in Society and Politics, when a great 
event is ready to be done, someone must come and do 
it — do it, perhaps, half unwittingly, by some single 
rash act — like that first fatal shot fired by an electric 
spark. 

But to return to Cyrus and his Persians. 

I know not whether the " Cyropasdia " is much 
read in your schools and universities. But it is one of 
the books which I should like to see, either in a 
translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of 
every young man. It is not all fact. It is but a 
historic romance. But it is better than history. It is 
an ideal book, like Sidney's "Arcadia" or Spenser's 
"Fairy Queen" — the ideal self- education of an ideal 
hero. And the moral of the book — ponder it well, all 



280 CYEUS, THE SEEYANT OF THE LORD. 

young men who have the chance or the hope of 
exercising authority among your fellow-men — the 
noble and most Christian moral of that heathen book 
is this : that the path to solid and beneficent influence 
over our fellow-men lies, not through brute force, not 
through cupidity, but through the highest morality; 
through justice, truthfulness, humanity, self-denial, 
modesty, courtesy, and all which makes man or woman 
lovely in the eyes of mortals or of God. 

Yes, the " Cyropsedia " is a noble book, about a 
noble personage. But I cannot forget that there are 
nobler words by far concerning that same noble 
personage, in the magnificent series of Hebrew Lyrics, 
which begins "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, 
saith the Lord" — in which the inspired poet, watching 
the rise of Cyrus and his Puritans, and the fall of 
Babylon, and the idolatries of the East, and the 
coming deliverance of his own countrymen, speaks 
of the Persian hero in words so grand that they have 
been often enough applied, and with all fitness, to one 
greater than Cyrus, and than all men : 



Who raised up the righteous man from the East, 

And called him to attend his steps ? 

Who subdued nations at his presence, 

And gave him dominion over kings ? 

And made them like the dust before his sword, 

And the driven stubble before his bow ? 

He pursueth them, he passeth in safety, 

By a way never trodden before by his feet. 

Who hath performed and made these things, 

Calling the generations from the beginning ? 

I, Jehovah, the first and the last, I am the same. 

Behold my servant, whom I will uphold ; 
My chosen, in whom my soul delighteth; 



CYEUS, THE SEEVANT OF THE LOED. 281 

I will make my spirit rest upon him, 

And he shall publish judgment to the nations. 

He shall not cry aloud, nor clamour, 

Nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets. 

The bruised reed he shall not break, 

And the smoking flax he shall not quench. 

He shall publish justice, and establish it. 

His force shall not be abated, nor broken, 

Until he has firmly seated justice in the earth, 

And the distant nations shall wait for his Law. 

Thus saith the God, even Jehovah, 

Who created the heavens, and stretched them out ; 

Who spread abroad the earth, and its produce, 

I, Jehovah, have called thee for a righteous end, 

And I will take hold of thy hand, and preserve thee, 

And I will give thee for a covenant to the people, 

And for a light to the nations ; 

To open the eyes of the blind, 

To bring the captives out of prison, 

And from the dungeon those who dwell in darkness. 

I am Jehovah — that is my name ; 

And my glory will I not give to another, 

~Nor my praise to the graven idols. 

Who saith to Cyrus — Thou art my shepherd, 

And he shall fulfil all my pleasure : 

Who saith to Jerusalem — Thou shalt be built ; 

And to the Temple — Thou shalt be founded. 

Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, 

To Cyrus whom I hold fast by his right hand, 

That I may subdue nations under him, 

And loose the loins of kings ; 

That I may open before him the two-leaved doors, 

And the gates shall not be shut ; 

I will go before thee 

And bring the mountains low. 

The gates of brass will I break in sunder, 

And the bars of iron hew down. 

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, 

And the hoards hid deep in secret places, 

That thou may est know that I am Jehovah. 



2S2 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

I have surnamed thee, though thou knowest not me. 

I am Jehovah, and none else ; 

Beside me there is no God. 

I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me, 

That they may know from the rising of the sun, 

And from the west, that there is none beside me ; 

I am Jehovah, and none else ; 

Forming light and creating darkness; 

Forming peace, and creating evil. 

I, Jehovah, make all these. 

This is the Hebrew prophet's conception of the 
great Puritan of the Old World who went forth with 
such a commission as this,, to destroy the idols of the 

East, while 

The isles saw that, and feared, 

And the ends of the earth were afraid ; 

They drew near, they came together ; 

Everyone helped his neighbour, 

And said to his brother, Be of good courage. 

The carver encouraged the smith, 

He that smoothed with the hammer 

Him that smote on the anvil; 

Saying of the solder, It is good ; 

And fixing the idol with nails, lest it be moved; 

But all in vain ; for as the poet goes on : 

Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped; 

Their idols were upon the cattle, 

A burden to the weary beast. 

They stoop, they bow down together ; 

They could not deliver their own charge; 

Themselves are gone into captivity. 

And what, to return, what was the end of the great 
Cyrus and of his empire ? 

Alas, alas ! as with all human glory, the end was 
not as the beginning. 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 283 

We are scarce bound to believe positively the story 
how Cyras made one war too many, and was cut off 
in the Scythian deserts, falling before the arrows of 
mere savages ; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured 
blood down the throat of the dead corpse, with the 
words, " Glut thyself with the gore for which thou hast 
thirsted." But it may be true — for Xenophon states 
it expressly, and with detail — that Cyrus, from the 
very time of his triumph, became an Eastern despot, 
a sultan or a shah, living apart from his people in 
mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace which 
he built for himself; and imitating and causing his 
nobles and satraps to imitate, in all but vice and 
effeminacy, the very Medes whom he had conquered. 
And of this there is no doubt — that his sons and their 
empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of 
corruption to which all despotisms are doomed, and 
became within 250 years, even as the Medes, the 
Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, 
children no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, 
of darkness and not of light, to be conquered by 
Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more 
shamefully than they had conquered the East. 

This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, 
alas ! as all human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not 
shamefully. 

But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I 
said, that to these Persians we owe that we are here 
to-night ? 

I do not say that without them we should not have 
been here. God, I presume, when He is minded to do 
anything, has more than one way of doing it. 

But that we are now the last link in a chain of 
causes and effects which reaches as far back as the 



284 CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 

emigration of the Persians southward from the plateau 
of Pamir, we cannot doubt. 

For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the 
Jews were freed from their captivity — large numbers 
of them at least — and sent home to their own Jerusalem. 
What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, 
to do that deed ? 

Those who like to impute the lowest motives may 
say, if they will, that Daniel and the later Isaiah found 
it politic to worship the rising sun, and natter the 
Persian conquerors : and that Cyrus and Darius in 
turn were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an im- 
pregnable frontier fortress between them and Egypt. 
Be it so ; I, who wish to talk of things noble, pure, 
lovely, and of good report, would rather point you 
once more to the magnificent poetry of the later 
Isaiah which commences at the 40th chapter of the 
Book of Isaiah, and say — There, upon the very face of 
the document, stands written the fact that the sympathy 
between the faithful Persian and the faithful Jew — the 
two puritans of the Old World, the two haters of lies, 
idolatries, superstitions, was actually as intense as it 
ought to have been, as it must have been. 

Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to 
Jerusalem preserved for us the Old Testament, while 
it restored to them a national centre, a sacred city, 
like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Eome to the Romans, 
Mecca to the Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their 
being utterly absorbed by the more civilised Eastern 
races among whom they had been scattered abroad as 
colonies of captives. 

Then another, and a seemingly needful link of 
cause and effect ensued : Alexander of Macedon 
destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became 



CYRUS, THE SERVANT OF THE LORD. 285 

Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became 
the head- quarters of Jewish learning. But for that 
very cause, the Scriptures were not left inaccessible to 
the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of 
the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an 
obsolete and hieratic tongue, but were translated into, 
and continued in, the then all but world-wide Hellenic 
speech, which was to the ancient world what French 
is to the modern. 

Then the East became Roman, without losing its 
Greek speech. And under the wide domination of 
that later Roman Empire — which had subdued and 
organised the whole known world, save the Parthian 
descendants of those old Persians, and our old Teutonic 
forefathers in their German forests and on their 
Scandinavian shores — that Divine book was carried far 
and wide, East and West, and South, from the heart 
of Abyssinia to the mountains of Armenia, and to the 
isles of the ocean, beyond Britain itself to Ireland and 
to the Hebrides. 

And that book — so strangely coinciding with the 
old creed of the earlier Persians — that book, long 
misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and over- 
grown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book 
it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the 
founders of your great nation. That book gave them 
their instinct of Freedom, tempered by reverence for 
Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry ; 
and made them not only say but act upon their own 
words, with these old Persians and with the Jewish 
prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt offering thou 
wouldst not; Then said we, Lo, we come. In the 
volume of the book it is written of us, that we come 
to do thy will, God. Yes, long and fantastic is the 



286 CYBITS, THE SEEVANT OF THE LOED. 

chain of causes and effects, which links yon here 
to the old heroes who came down from Central Asia, 
because the land had grown so wondrous cold, that 
there were ten months of winter to two of summer; 
and when simply after warmth and life, and food for 
them and for their flocks, they wandered forth to found 
and help to found a spiritual kingdom. 

And even in their migration, far back in these dim 
and mystic ages, have we found the earliest link of 
the long chain ? Not so. What if the legend of 
the change of climate be the dim recollection of an 
enormous physical fact ? What if it, and the gradual 
depopulation of the whole north of Asia, be owing, as 
geologists now suspect, to the slow and age-long 
uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm 
Arctic sea farther and farther to the northward, and 
placing between it and the Highlands of Thibet an 
ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying animals, 
and driving whole races southward, in search of the 
summer and the sun ? 

What if the first link in the chain, as yet con- 
ceivable by man, should be the cosmic changes in the 
distribution of land and water, which filled the mouths 
of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly 
mammoth and rhinoceros ; and those again, doubt it 
not, of other revolutions, reaching back and back, and 
on and on, into the infinite unknown ? Why not ? 
For so are all human destinies 

Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God. 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION, 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION.* 



Theee is a theory abroad in the world just now about 
the origin of the human race, which has so many 
patent and powerful physiological facts to support it 
that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or im- 
possible; and that is, that man's mortal body and 
brain were derived from some animal and ape-like 
creature. Of that I am not going to speak now. My 
subject is : How this creature called man, from what- 
ever source derived, became civilised, rational, and 
moral. And I am sorry to say that there is tacked on 
by many to the first theory, another which does not 
follow from it, and which has really nothing to do 
with it, and it is this i That man, with all his won- 
derful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled 
yet always precious, at once his torment and his joy, 
his very hope of everlasting life; that man, I say, 
developed himself, unassisted, out of a state of pri- 
maeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure 
and pain, by observing what actions would pay in the 
long run and what would not ; and so learnt to con- 
quer his selfishness by a more refined and extended 
selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worlclli- 
* This lecture was given in America in 1874. 
VOL. I. — H. E. TJ 



290 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

ness, and then, in a few instances, his worldliness for 
next-worldliness. I hope I need not say that I do 
not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be a 
Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, 
if I thought that human civilisation had sprung from 
such a dunghill as that, I should, in honour to my 
race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere. 

Why talk of the shame of our ancestors ? I want 
to talk of their honour and glory. I want to talk, if I 
talk at all, about great times, about noble epochs, 
noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk ; about 
times in which the human race — it may be through 
many mistakes, alas ! and sin, and sorrow, and blood- 
shed — struggled up one step higher on those great 
stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the 
far-off city of God ; the perfect polity, the perfect 
civilisation, the perfect religion, which is eternal in 
the heavens. 

Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to 
speak. I am bound to do so first, in courtesy to my 
hearers. For in choosing such a subject I took for 
granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them 
which can appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of 
that which is lofty and heroic, and that which is useful 
indeed, though not to the purses merely or the mouths 
of men, but to their intellects and spirits ; that highest 
philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneer- 
ingly said of her) bake no bread, she — and she alone, 
can at least do this — make men worthy to eat the 
bread which God has given them. 

I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I 
have never yet met, or read of, the human company 
who did not require, now and then at least, being 
reminded of such times and such personages — of 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 291 

whatsoever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of 
good report, if there be any manhood and any praise 
to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such things, that 
we may keep up in our minds as much as possible a 
lofty standard, a pure ideal, instead of sinking to the 
mere selfish standard which judges all things, even 
those of the world to come, by profit and by loss, and 
into that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows 
to believe that the world is constructed of bricks and 
timber, and kept going by the price of stocks. 

We are all tempted, and the easier and more 
prosperous we are, the more we are tempted, to fall 
into that sordid and shallow frame of mind. Sordid 
even when its projects are most daring, its outward 
luxuries most refined ; and shallow, even when most 
acute, when priding itself most on its knowledge of 
human nature, and of the secret springs which, so 
it dreams, move the actions and make the history of 
nations and of men. All are tempted that way, even 
the noblest-hearted. Adhcesit pavimento venter, says 
the old psalmist. I am growing like the snake, 
crawling in the dust, and eating the dust in which I 
crawl. I try to lift up my eyes to the heavens, to the 
true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal nobleness 
which was before all time, and shall be still when 
time has passed away. But to lift up myself is what I 
cannot do. Who will help me ? Who will quicken 
me ? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give 
me life ? The true, pure, lofty human life which I 
did not inherit from the primaeval ape, which the ape- 
nature in me is for ever trying to stifle, and make me 
that which I know too well I could so easily become 
— a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute ? Death 
itself, which seems at times so fair, is fair because even 

u 2 



202 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

it may raise me up and deliver me from the burden 
of this animal and mortal body : 



'Tis life, not death for which I pant ; 
'Tis life, whereof my nerves are sc «.utJ ; 
More life, and fuller, that I want. 



Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and 
muscles, nerves and brain, which I have in common 
with apes and dogs and horses. I am a man — thou 
art a man or woman — not because we have a flesh 
— Grod forbid ! but because there is a spirit in us, a 
divine spark and ray, which nature did not give, and 
which nature cannot take away. And therefore, w r hile 
I live on earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the 
flesh, that I may be, indeed, a mcui ; and this same 
gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me, shall be the 
very element in me which I will renounce, defy, 
despise ; at least, if I am minded to be, not a merely 
higher savage, but a truly higher civilised man. 
Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth, 
more finery, more self-indulgence — even more assthetic 
and artistic luxury ; but more virtue, more knowledge, 
more self-control, even though I earn scanty bread by 
heavy toil; and when I compare the Cassar of Home 
or the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or 
Persia, with the hermit of the Thebaid, starving* in his 
frock of earner's hair, with his soul fixed on the 
ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however 
wildly and fantastically, to become an angel and not 
an ape, I will say the hermit, and not the Cassar, is the 
civilised man. 

There are plenty of histories of civilisation and 
theories of civilisation abroad in the world just now., 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 293 

and which profess to show you how the primaeval 
savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised 
man. For my part, with all due and careful considera- 
tion, I confess I attach very little value to any of 
them : and for this simple reason that we have no 
facts. The facts are lost. 

Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly 
true, it is easy enough to prove that proposition to be 
true, at least to your own satisfaction. If you assert 
with the old proverb, that you may make a silk purse 
out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare 
suppose anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for 
yourselves all the intermediate stages of the transfor- 
mation, however startling. And, indeed, if modern 
philosophers had stuck more closely to this old pro- 
verb, and its defining verb " make/'' and tried to show 
how some person or persons — let them be who they 
may — men, angels, or gods — made the sow's ear into 
the silk purse, and the savage into the sage — they 
might have pleaded that they were still trying to keep 
their feet upon the firm ground of actual experience. 
But while their theory is, that the sow's ear grew 
into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and 
without any intention of so bettering itself in life, 
why, I think that those who have studied the history 
which, lies behind them, and the poor human nature 
which, is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing, and 
failing around them, and which seems on the greater 
part of this planet going downwards and not upwards, 
and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase 
of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and 
that which pertaineth thereto ; then we, I think, may 
be excused if we say with the old Stoics — eVe^o) — I 
withhold my judgment. I know nothing about the 



294 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

matter yet; and you, oh my imaginative though learned 
friends, know I suspect very little either. 

Eldest of things, Divine Equality : 

so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For 
if, as I believe, the human race sprang from a single 
pair, there must have been among their individual 
descendants an equality far greater than any which 
has been known on earth during historic times. But 
that equality was at best the infantile innocence of 
the primary race, which faded away in the race as 
quickly, alas ! as it does in the individual child. 
Divine — therefore it was one of the first blessings 
which man lost; one of the last, I fear, to which he 
will return ; that to which civilisation, even at its best 
yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there 
for short periods ; but towards which it is striving as 
an ideal goal, and, as I trust, not in vain. 

The eldest of things which we see actually as 
history is not equality, but an already developed 
hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself, and 
yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying 
itself by the very means which it uses to keep itself 
alive. 

" There were giants in the earth in those days. 
And Nimrod began to be a mighty one in the 
earth »— 

A mighty hunter ; and his game was man. 

No ; it is not equality which we see through the 
dim mist of bygone ages. 

What we do see is — I know not whether you will 
think me superstitious or old-fashioned, but so I hold 
— very much what the earlier books of the Bible show 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 295 

us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman 
histories, Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscrip- 
tions, national epics, legends, fragments of legends — 
in the New World as in the Old — all tell the same 
story. Not the story without an end, but the story 
without a beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, 
the world stands on an elephant, and the elephant 
on a tortoise, and the tortoise on — what ? No man 
knows. I do not know. I only assert deliberately, 
waiting, as Napoleon says, till the world come round 
to me, that the tortoise does not stand — as is held by 
certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some 
personally dear to me — upon the savages who chipped 
flints and fed on mammoth and reindeer in North- 
western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few 
hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little 
fellows — the kinsmen probably of the Esquimaux and 
Lapps — could have been but the av ant- couriers, or 
more probably the fugitives from the true mass of 
mankind — spreading northward from the Tropics into 
climes becoming, after the long catastrophe of the age 
of ice, once more genial enough to support men who 
knew what decent comfort was, and were strong 
enough to get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. 
The tortoise of the human race does not stand on a 
savage. The savage may stand on an ape-like creature. 
I do not say that he does not. I do not say that he 
does. I do not know ; and no man knows. But at 
least I say that the civilised man and his world stand 
not upon creatures like to any savage now known 
upon the earth. For first, it seems to be most un- 
likely ; and next, and more important to an inductive 
philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no savages 
becoming really civilised men — that is, not merely 



296 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

men who will ape the outside of our so-called civilisa- 
tion, even absorb a few of our ideas ; not merely that ; 
but truly civilised men who will think for themselves, 
invent for themselves, act for themselves ; and when 
the sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed 
into their hands, carry it on unextinguished, and 
transmit it to their successors without running back 
every moment to get it relighted by those from whom 
they received it : and who are bound — remember that 
— patiently and lovingly to relight it for them ; to give 
freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has 
given to them and to their ancestors ; and let God, not 
man, be judge of how much the Red Indian or the 
Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is capable of 
receiving and of using. 

Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely 
no record, as far as I am aware, of any savage tribe 
civilising itself. It is a bold saying. I stand by my 
assertion : most happy to find myself confuted, even 
in a single instance ; for my beiug wrong would give 
me, what I can have no objection to possess, a higher 
opinion than I have now, of the unassisted capabilities 
of my fellow-men. 

But civilisation must have begun somewhen, some- 
where, with some person, or some family, or some 
nation ; and how did it begin ? 

I have said already that I do not know. But I 
have had my dream — like the philosopher — and as I 
have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I shall not 
be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this : 

What if the beginnings of true civilisation in 
this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incom- 
prehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural 
race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 297 

miraculous and supernatural likewise ? What if that 
be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its 
origin ? What if the few first chapters of the most 
ancient and most sacred book should point, under 
whatever symbols, to the actual and the only possible 
origin of civilisation, the education of a man, or a 
family by beings of some higher race than man ? What 
if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even 
of a deeper and wider application than divines have 
been wont to think ? What if individuals, if peoples, 
have been chosen out from time to time for a special 
illumination, that they might be the lights of the 
earth, and the salt of the world ? What if they have, 
each in their turn, abused that divine teaching to 
make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers, 
of the less enlightened ? To increase the inequalities 
of nature by their own selfishness, instead of decreas- 
ing them, into the equality of grace, by their own 
self-sacrifice ? What if the Bible after all was right, 
and even more right than we were taught to think ? 

So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to 
it, you think me still worth listening to, in this 
enlightened nineteenth century, I will go on. 

At all events, what we see at the beginning of all 
known and half -known history, is not savagery, but 
high civilisation, at least of an outward and material 
kind. Do you demur ? Then recollect, I pray yon, 
that the three oldest peoples known to history on 
this planet are Egypt, China, Hindostan. The first 
glimpses of the world are always like those which the 
book of Genesis gives us ; like those which your own 
continent gives us. As it was 400 years ago in 
America, so it was in North Africa and in Asia 4000 
years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know. Nay, if any- 



298 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

one should ask — And why not 400,000 years ago, on 
Miocene continents long sunk beneath the Tropic sea ? 
I for one have no rejoinder save — We have no proofs 
as yet. 

There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into 
the as yet dim dawn of history, what the old Arabs 
call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans — colossal monar- 
chies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, 
creeds; with aristocracies, priesthoods — seemingly 
always of a superior and conquering race; with a mass 
of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed 
of older conquered races ; of imported slaves too, and 
their descendants. 

But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, 
the priesthood ? You inquire, and you find that they 
usually know not themselves. They are usually — I 
had almost dared to say, always — foreigners. They 
have crossed the neighbouring mountains. They have 
come by sea, like Dido to Carthage, like Manco Oassae 
and Mama Bello to America, and they have sometimes 
forgotten when. At least they are wiser, stronger, 
fairer, than the aborigines. They are to them — as 
Jacques Cartier was to the Indians of Canada — as 
gods. They are not sure that they are not descended 
from gods. They are the Children of the Sun, or 
what not. The children of light, who ray out such 
light as they have, upon the darkness of their subjects. 
They are at first, probably, civilisers, not conquerors. 
For, if tradition is worth anything — and we have 
nothing else to go upon — they are at first few in 
number. They come as settlers, or even as single 
sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many who 
influence the few, but the few who influence the many. 
So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed. 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 299 

But the higher calling is soon forgotten. The purer 
light is soon darkened in pride and selfishness, luxury 
and lust ; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the 
daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take 
them wives of all that they choose. And so a mixed 
race springs up and increases, without detriment at 
first to the commonwealth. For, by a well-known 
law of heredity, the cross between two races, probably 
far apart, produces at first a progeny possessing the 
forces, and, alas ! probably the vices of both. And 
when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, 
there are giants in the earth in those days, men of 
renown. The Roman Empire, remember, was never 
stronger than when the old Patrician blood had 
mingled itself with that of every nation round the 
Mediterranean. • 

But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, 
spread from above, as well as from below. The just 
aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes an unjust 
one of mere power and privilege ; that again, one of 
mere wealth, corrupting and corrupt ; and is destroyed, 
not by the people from below, but by the monarch 
from above. The hereditary bondsmen may know 

Who would be free, 
Himself must strike the blow. 

But they dare not, know not how. The king must do 
it for them. He must become the State. " Better 
one tyrant," as Voltaire said, " than many." Better 
stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many 
wolves, each in the nearest wood. And so arise those 
truly monstrous Eastern despotisms, of which modern 
Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen ; 
for Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years 



300 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

to the influence of the free nations to be counted as 
despotisms pure and simple — despotisms in which 
men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the 
hideous counterfeit, a Man-god — a poor human being 
endowed by public opinion with the powers of deity, 
while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of humanity. 
But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage 
of every civilisation — even that of Rome, which ripened 
itself upon this earth the last in ancient times, and, I 
had almost said, until this very day, except among 
the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have 
preserved through all temptations, and reasserted 
through all dangers, the free ideas which have been 
our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus beheld us, with 
respect and awe, among our German forests, and saw 
in us the future masters of the Roman Empire. 

Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. 
But shall we despise those who went before us, and on 
whose accumulated labours we now stand ? 

Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors ? 
Shall we not show our reverence by copying them, at 
least whenever, as in those old Persians, we see in 
them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, 
and devotion to the God of light and life and good ? 
And shall we not feel pity, instead of contempt, for 
their ruder forms of government, their ignorances, 
excesses, failures — so excusable in men who, with 
little or no previous teaching, were trying to solve for 
themselves for the first time the deepest social and 
political problems of humanity. 

Yes, those old despotisms we trust are dead, and 
never to revive. But their corpses are the corpses, 
not of our enemies, but of our friends and prede- 
cessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd against 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 301 

Ahriinan — light against darkness, order against dis- 
order. Confusedly they fought, and sometimes ill : 
but their corpses piled the breach and filled the trench 
for us, and over their corpses we step on to what 
should be to us an easy victory — what may be to us, 
yet, a shameful ruin. 

For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of 
the earth and the light of the world, what if the salt 
should lose its savour ? What if the light which is in 
us should become darkness ? For myself, when I 
look upon the responsibilities of the free nations of 
modern times, so far from boasting of that liberty in 
which I delight — and to keep which I freely, too, 
could die — I rather say, in fear and trembling, God 
help us on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to 
make us free ; responsible, each individual of us, not 
only to ourselves, but to Him and all mankind. For 
if we fall we shall fall I know not whither, and I dare 
not think. 

How those old despotisms, the mighty empires 
of old time, fell, we know, and we can easily explain. 
Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by universal 
selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic 
coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, 
at last burst through, the painted skin of prescrijDtive 
order which held them together. Some braver and 
abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some 
little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the 
fruit was ripe for gathering ; and, caring naught for 
superior numbers — and saying with German Alaric 
when the Eomans boasted of their numbers, " The 
thicker the hay the easier it is mowed" — struck one 
brave blow at the huge inflated wind-bag — as Cyrus 
and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes ; as 



302 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

Alexander and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards 
at the Persians — and behold, it collapsed upon the 
spot. And then the victors took the place of the 
conquered ; and became in their turn an aristocracy, 
and then a despotism ; and in their turn rotted down 
and perished. And so the vicious circle repeated 
itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria to 
Mexico and Peru. 

And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have 
need to watch, and sternly watch, ourselves. Equality 
of some kind or other is, as I said, our natural and 
seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality ? For 
there are two — a true one and a false ; a noble and a 
base ; a healthful and a ruinous. There is the truly 
divine equality, and there is the brute equality of 
sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms. There is the 
equality which is founded on mutual envy. The 
equality which respects others, and the equality which 
asserts itself. The equality which longs to raise all 
alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all 
alike. The equality which says : Thou art as good as 
I, and it may be better too, in the sight of God. And 
the equality which says : I am as good as thou, and 
will therefore see if I cannot master thee. 

Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and 
every free people, are the two instincts struggling for 
the mastery, called by the same name, but bearing 
the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, 
the Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base 
and the noble, are, as in the old Greek legend, con- 
tending for the prize. And the prize is no less a 
one than all free people of this planet. 

In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and 
men unite in the equality of mutual respect and 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. S03 

mutual service,, they move one step farther towards 
realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it 
is written : " The despots of the nations exercise 
dominion over them,, and they that exercise authority 
over them are called benefactors. But he that will be 
great among you let him be the servant of all." 

And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and 
selfishness, not self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a 
State, men move on, one step forward, towards realising 
that kingdom of the devil upon earth, " Every man 
for himself and the devil take the hindmost."" Only, 
alas ! in that evil equality of envy and hate, there is 
no hindmost, and the devil takes them all alike. 

And so is a period of discontent, revolution, inter- 
necine anarchy, followed by a tyranny endured, as in 
old Rome, by men once free, because tyranny will at 
least do for them what they were too lazy and greedy 
and envious to do for themselves. 

And all because they have forgot 

What 'tis to be a man — to curb aud spurn 

The tyrant in us : the ignobler self 

Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute ; 

And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain, 

No purpose, save its share in that wild war 

In which, through countless ages, living things 

Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God, 

Are we as creeping things, which have no lord ? 

That we are brutes, great God, we know too well ; 

Apes daintier-featured ; silly birds, who flaunt 

Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step; 

Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs ; 

Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel, 

Instead of teeth and claws : — all these we are. 

Are we no more than these, save in degree ? 

Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts, 

Taking the swoi-d, to perish by the sword 



304 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

Upon the universal battle-field, 

Even as the things upon the moor outside ? 

The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs ; 
The pines eat up the heath ; the grub the pine ; 
The finch the grub ; the hawk the silly finch ; 
And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey, 
Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak ; 
The many eat the few ; great nations, small ; 
And he who cometh in the name of all 
Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, 
And, armed by his own victims, eat up all. 
While ever out of the eternal heavens 
Looks patient down the great magnanimous God, 
Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice 
All to Himself P Nay : but Himself to all ; 
Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day, 
What 'tis to be a man — to give, not take ; 
To serve, not rule ; to nourish, not devour ; 
To lift, not crush ; if need, to die, not live. 

" He that cometh in the name of all" — the popular 
military despot — the (C saviour of his country " — he is 
our internecine enemy on both sides of the Atlantic, 
whenever he rises — the inaugurator of that Imperialism, 
that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her 
liberties merely, but her virtues, were decaying out of 
her — the sink into which all wicked States, whether 
republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply 
because men must eat and drink for to-morrow they 
die. The Military and Bureaucratic Despotism which 
keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by panem et 
circenses — bread and games — or, if need be, Pilgrim- 
ages ; that the few may make money, eat, drink, and 
be merry, as long as it can last. That, let it ape as it 
may — as did the Cassars of old Rome at first — as 
another Emperor did even in our own days — the forms 
of dead freedom, really upholds an artificial luxury by 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 305 

brute force; and consecrates the basest of all aris- 
tocracies, the aristocracy of the money-bag, by the 
divine sanction of the bayonet. 

That at all risks, even at the price of precious 
blood, the free peoples of the earth must ward off from 
them ; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it is, it does not 
even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last. 
Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last ? How 
can it last ? This falsehood, like all falsehoods, must 
collapse at one touch of IthuriePs spear of truth and 
fact. And — 

" Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how 
Thou dost set them in slippery places, and casteth 
them. down. Suddenly do they perish, and come to a 
fearful end. Yea, like as a dream when one awaketh, 
so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of the 
city." 

Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, 
neither in England nor in the United States ? 

And then ? What then ? None knows, and none 
can know. 

The future of France and Spain, the future of the 
Tropical Republics of Spanish America, is utterly 
blank and dark ; not to be prophesied, I hold, by 
mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in 
the history of the past whereby to judge the tendencies 
of the present. Will they revive ? Under the genial 
influences of free institutions will the good seed which 
is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit 
upwards ? and make them all what that fair France 
has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in past 
years — a joy and an inspiration to all the nations 
round ? Shall it be thus ? God grant it may ; but 
He, and He alone, can tell. We only stand by, 

VOL. I. — H. E, X 



306 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the 
working ont of a tremendous new social problem, 
which must affect the future of the whole civilised 
world. 

For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate 
themselves, what can befall ? What, when even 
Imperialism has been tried and failed, as fail it must ? 
What but that lower depth within the lowest deep ? 

That last dread mood 
Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude. 
ISTo law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God. 
When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring, 
Crouched on the bare-worn sod, 
Babbling about the unreturning spring, 
And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save s 
The toothless nations shiver to their grave. 

And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest 
we fall. Let us accept, in modesty and in awe, the 
responsibility of our freedom, and remember that that 
freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned 
way. Let us remember that the one condition of a 
true democracy is the same as the one condition of a 
true aristocracy, namely, virtue. Let us teach our 
children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 
300 years ago — " It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue 
that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, 
the subject a king, the lowborn noble, the deformed 
beautiful. These things neither the whirling wheel of 
fortune can overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of 
worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age 
abolish." 

Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides 
of the Atlantic. For if they — which God forbid — 
should grow corrupt and weak by their own sins, 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 307 

there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer 
our descendants and bring them back to reason, as 
those old Jews were brought by bitter shame and woe. 
And all that is before them and the whole civilised 
world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the 
world has not seen for ages — a true Ragnarok, a 
twilight of the very gods, an age such as the wise 
woman foretold in the old Voluspa. 

When brethren shall be 
Each other's bane, 
And sisters' sons rend 
The ties of kin. 
Hard will be that age, 
An age of bad women, 
An axe-age, a sword-age, 
Shields oft cleft in twain, 
A storm-age, a wolf-age, 
Ere earth meet its doom. 

So sang, 2000 years ago, perhaps, the great un- 
named prophetess, of our own race, of what might be, 
if we should fail mankind and our own calling and 
election. 

God grant that day may never come. But God 
grant, also, that if that day does come, then may 
come true also what that wise Yala sang, of the day 
when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up 
with fire. 

When slaked Surtnr's flame is, 

Still the man and the maider 

Hight Valour and Life, 

Shall keep themselves hid 

In the wood of remembrance. 

The dew of the dawning 

For food it shall serve them : 

From them spring new peoples. 



308 ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 

New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form, 
of human society is democracy. 

A nation — and, were it even possible, a whole 
world — of free men, lifting free foreheads to God and 
Nature; calling no man master — for one is their 
master, even God ; knowing and obeying their duties 
towards the Maker of the Universe, and therefore to 
each other, and that not from fear, nor calculation of 
profit or loss, but because they loved and liked it, and 
had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and 
peace; because the law of God was in their hearts, and 
needing at last, it may be, neither king nor priest, for 
each man and each woman, in their place, were kings 
and priests to God. Such a nation — such a society — 
what nobler conception of mortal existence can we 
form ? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom of 
God come on earth ? 

And tell me not that that is impossible — too fair a 
dream to be ever realised. All that makes it impossible 
is the selfishness, passions, weaknesses, of those who 
would be blest were they masters of themselves, and 
therefore of circumstances ; who are miserable because, 
not being masters of themselves, they try to master 
circumstance, to pull down iron walls with weak and 
clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free 
from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, 
self. 

But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It 
is so beautiful that it must be true. If not now, nor 
centuries hence, yet still hereafter. God would never, 
as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagi- 
nation had He not meant to translate, some day, that 
imagination into fact. 

The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a 



ANCIENT CIVILISATION. 309 

single mind or generation can grasp, will ensure failure 
on failure — follies, fanaticisms, disappointments, even 
crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children baulked 
of their holiday. 

But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and per- 
fected ; not perhaps here, or among our peoples, or any 
people which now exist on earth : but in some future 
civilisation — it may be in far lands beyond the sea — 
when all that you and we have made and done shall 
be as the forest-grown mounds of the old nameless 
civilisers of the Mississippi valley.* 



* This lecture and the two preceding ones, being published after 
the author's death, have not had the benefit of his corrections. 



RONDELET, 
THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 



RONDELET,* 
THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST.* 



11 Apollo, god of medicine, exiled from the rest of the 
earth, was straying once across the Narbonnaise in 
Gaul, seeking to fix his abode there. Driven from 
Asia, from Africa, and from the rest of Europe, he 
wandered through all the towns of the province in 
search of a place propitious for him and for his disciples. 
At last he perceived a new city, constructed from the 
ruins of Maguelonne, of Lattes, and of Substantion. 
He contemplated long its site, its aspect, its neigh- 
bourhood, and resolved to establish on this hill of 
Montpellier a temple for himself and his priests. All 
smiled on his desires. By the genius of the soil, by 
the character of the inhabitants, no town is more fit for 
the culture of letters, and above all of medicine. What 
site is more delicious and more lovely ? A heaven 

* A Life of Eondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found 
appended to his works ; and with an account of his illness and 
death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal 
of any man, wise or foolish. Many interesting details beside, I owe to 
the courtesy of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a dis- 
course on " Eondelet et sea Disciples," which appeared, with a learned 
and curious Appendix, in the " Montpellier Medical " for 1866. 

+ This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869. 



314 RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 

pure and smiling ; a city built with magnificence ; men 
born for all the labours of the intellect. All around 
vast horizons and enchanting sites — meadows,, vines, 
olives, green champaigns ; mountains and hills, rivers, 
brooks, lagoons, and the sea. Everywhere a luxuriant 
vegetation — everywhere the richest production of the 
land and the water. Hail to thee, sweet and dear city ! 
Hail, happy abode of Apollo, who spreadest afar the 
light of the glory of thy name \" 

" This fine tirade," says Dr. Maurice Raynaud— from 
whose charming book on the " Doctors of the Time of 
Moliere " I quote — " is not, as one might think, the 
translation of a piece of poetry. It is simply part of a 
public oration by Francois Fanchon, one of the most 
illustrious chancellors of the faculty of medicine of 
Montpellier in the seventeenth century." " From time 
immemorial," he says, " { the faculty ' of Montpellier 
had made itself remarkable by a singular mixture of 
the sacred and the profane. The theses which were 
sustained there began by an invocation to God, the 
Blessed Virgin, and St. Luke, and ended by these 
words : ' This thesis will be sustained in the sacred 
Temple of Apollo/ " 

But however extravagant Chancellor Fanchon's 
praises of his native city may seem, they are really 
not exaggerated. The Narbonnaise, or Languedoc, is 
perhaps the most charming district of charming France. 
In the far north-east gleam the white Alps ; in the far 
south-west the white Pyrenees ; and from the purple 
glens and yellow downs of the Oevennes on the north- 
west, the Herault slopes gently down towards the 
' ' Etangs," or great salt-water lagoons, and the vast 
alluvial flats of the Oamargue, the field of Caius Marius, 
where still run herds of half -wild horses, descended 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 315 

from some ancient Roman stock; while beyond all 
glitters the blue Mediterranean. The great almond 
orchards, each one sheet of rose-colour in spring; the 
mulberry orchards, the oliveyards, the vineyards, cover 
every foot of available upland soil : save where the 
rugged and arid downs are sweet with a thousand odori- 
ferous plants, from which the bees extract the famous 
white honey of Narbonne. The native flowers and 
shrubs, of a beauty and richness rather Eastern than 
European, have made the " Elora Montpeliensis," and 
with it the names of Rondelet and his disciples, famous 
among botanists ; and the strange fish and shells upon 
its shores afforded Rondelet materials for his immortal 
work upon the " Animals of the Sea." The innumerable 
wild fowl of the Bouches du Rhone; the innumerable 
songsters and other birds of passage, many of them 
unknown in these islands, and even in the north of 
France itself, which haunt every copse of willow and 
aspen along the brook-sides; the gaudy and curious 
insects which thrive beneath that clear, fierce, and yet 
bracing sunlight ; all these have made the district of 
Montpellier a home prepared by Nature for those who 
study and revere her. 

Neither was Chancellor Eanchon misled by patriotism, 
when he said the pleasant people who inhabit that dis- 
trict are fit for all the labours of the intellect. They 
are a very mixed race, and, like most mixed races, 
quick-witted, and handsome also. There is probably 
much Roman blood among them, especially in the 
towns; for Languedoc, or Gallia Narbonnensis, as it 
was called of old, was said to be more Roman than 
Rome itself. The Roman remains are more perfect 
and more interesting — so the late Dr. Whewell used to 
say — than any to be seen now in Italy; and the old 



316 KONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUKALIST. 

capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of 
Roman antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order 
to fortify the city upon a modern system against the 
invading armies of Charles Y. There must be much 
Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc : for the Visi- 
gothic Kings held their courts there from the fifth 
century, until the time that they were crushed by the 
invading Moors. Spanish blood, likewise, there may 
be; for much of Languedoc was held in the early 
Middle Age by those descendants of Eudes of Aqui- 
taine who established themselves as kings of Majorca 
and Arragon ; and Languedoc did not become entirely 
French till 1349, when Philip le Bel bought Mont- 
pellier of those potentates. The Moors, too, may have 
left some traces of their race behind. They held the 
country from about a.d. 713 to 758, when they were 
finally expelled by Charles Martel and Eudes. One 
sees to this day their towers of meagre stonework, 
perched on the grand Roman masonry of those old 
amphitheatres, which they turned into fortresses. One 
may see, too — so tradition holds — upon those very 
amphitheatres the stains of the fires with which 
Charles Martel smoked them out ; and one may see, 
too, or fancy that one sees, in the aquiline features, 
the bright black eyes, the lithe and graceful gestures, 
which are so common in Languedoc, some touch of the 
old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over 
that Christian land. 

Whether or not the Moors left behind any traces of 
their blood, they left behind, at least, traces of their 
learning ; for the university of Montpellier claimed to 
have been founded by Moors at a date of altogether 
abysmal antiquity. They looked upon the Arabian 
physicians of the Middle Age, on Avicenna and 



EONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 317 

Averrhoes, as modern innovators, and derived their 
parentage from certain mythic doctors of Cordova, 
who, when the Moors were expelled from Spain in the 
eighth century, fled to Montpellier, bringing with them 
traditions of that primeval science which had been 
revealed to Adam while still in Paradise ; and founded 
Montpellier, the mother of all the universities in 
Europe. Nay, some went farther still, and told of 
Bengessaus and Ferragius, the physicians of Charle- 
magne, and of Marilephus, chief physician of King 
Chilperic, and even — if a letter of St. Bernard's was to 
be believed — of a certain bishop who went as early as 
the second century to consult the doctors of Mont- 
pellier ; and it would have been in vain to reply to 
them that in those days, and long after them, Mont- 
pellier was not yet built. The facts are said to be : 
that as early as the beginning of the thirteenth cen- 
tury Montpellier had its schools of law, medicine, and 
arts, which were erected into a university by Pope 
Nicholas IV. in 1289. 

The university of Montpellier, like — I believe — 
most foreign ones, resembled more a Scotch than an 
English university. The students lived, for the most 
part, not in colleges, but in private lodgings, and con- 
stituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of 
the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal 
suffrage. A terror they were often to the respectable 
burghers, for they had all the right to carry arms; 
and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their 
creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which, 
with their swords, were generally all the property they 
possessed. If, moreover, anyone set up a noisy or 
unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars 
could compel the town authorities to turn him out. 



318 RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 

They were most of them, probably, mere boys of from 
twelve to twenty, living poorly, working hard, and — 
those at least of them who were in the colleges — 
cruelly beaten daily, after the fashion of those times ; 
but they seem to have comforted themselves under 
their troubles by a good deal of wild life out of school, 
by rambling into the country on the festivals of the 
saints, and now and then by acting plays ; notably, 
that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 
1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a 
dumb wife ; " which " joyous patelinage " remains 
unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic 
song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen 
acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer — the 
three trades were then combined — in Montpellier, and 
born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, 
being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the canons of 
Maguelonne, near by, had even given him the revenues 
of a small chapel — a job of nepotism which was common 
enough in those days. But his heart was in science 
and medicine. He set off, still a mere boy, to Paris to 
study there ; and returned to Montpellier, at the age 
of eighteen, to study again. 

The next year, 1530, while still a scholar himself, 
he was appointed procurator of the scholars— a post 
which brought him in a small fee on each matriculation 
— and that year he took a fee, among others, from 
one of the most remarkable men of that or of any age, 
Francois Rabelais himself. 

And what shall I say of him ? — who stands alone, 
like Shakespeare, in his generation; possessed of 
colossal learning — of all science which could be 
gathered in his days — of practical and statesmanlike 
wisdom — of knowledge of languages, ancient and 



EONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 319 

modern, beyond all his compeers — of eloquence, which 
when he speaks of pure and noble things becomes 
heroic, and, as it were, inspired — of scorn for mean- 
ness, hypocrisy, ignorance — of esteem, genuine and 
earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more 
moderate of the Reformers who were spreading the 
Scriptures in Europe, — and all this great light wilfully 
hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. He 
is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character 
likewise ; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the 
satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the 
mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and 
comes forth high and pure ; in Rabelais, alas ! the 
victor is the ape, while the man himself sinks down in 
cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He 
returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious life; to die 
— says the legend — saying, " I go to seek a great 
perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school 
of Pantagruelists — careless young gentlemen, whose 
ideal was to laugh at everything, to believe in nothing, 
and to gratify their fiVe senses like the brutes which 
perish. There are those who read his books to make 
them laugh ; the wise man, when he reads them, will 
be far more inclined to weep. Let any young man 
who may see these words remember, that in him, as in 
Rabelais, the ape and the man are struggling for the 
mastery. Let him take warning by the fate of one 
who was to him as a giant to a pigmy ; and think of 
Tennyson's words — 

Arise, and fly 

The reeling faun, the sensual feast ; 

Strive upwards, working out the beast, 

And let the ape and tiger die. 

But to return. Down among them there at Mont- 



320 RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 

pellier, like a brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful 
Rabelais, in the year 1530. He had fled, some say, for 
his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a 
martyr, and he had been terrified at the execution of 
poor Louis de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of 
Erasmus likewise. This Lonis de Berquin, a man well 
known in those days, was a gallant young gentleman 
and scholar, holding a place in the court of Francis I., 
who had translated into French the works of Erasmus, 
Luther, and Melancthon, and had asserted that it was 
heretical to invoke the Virgin Mary instead of the 
Holy Spirit, or to call her our Hope and our Life, 
which titles — Berquin averred — belonged alone to 
God. Twice had the doctors of the Sorbonne, with 
that terrible persecutor, Noel Beda, at their head, 
seized poor Berquin, and tried to burn his books and 
him ; twice had that angel in human form, Marguerite 
d'Angouleme, sister of Francis I., saved him from their 
clutches; but when Francis — taken prisoner at the 
battle of Pavia — at last returned from his captivity in 
Spain, the suppression of heresy and the burning of 
heretics seemed to him and to his mother, Louise of 
Savoy, a thank-offering so acceptable to God, that 
Louis Berquin — who would not, in spite of the en- 
treaties of Erasmus, purchase his life by silence — was 
burnt at last on the Place de Greve, being first 
strangled, because he was of gentle blood. 

Montpellier received its famous guest joyfully. 
Rabelais was now forty-two years old, and a dis- 
tinguished savant ; so they excused hiin his three 
years' undergraduate's career, and invested him at 
once with the red gown of the bachelors. That red 
gown — or, rather, the ragged phantom of it — is still 
shown at Montpellier, and must be worn by each 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 321 

bachelor when he takes his degree. Unfortunately, 
antiquarians assure us that the precious garment has 
been renewed again and again — the students having 
clipped bits of it away for relics, and clipped as 
earnestly from the new gowns as their predecessors 
had done from the authentic original. 

Doubtless, the coming of such a man among them 
to lecture on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the 
Ars Parva of Galen, not from the Latin translations 
then in use, but from original Greek texts, with com- 
ments and corrections of his own, must have had a 
great influence on the minds of the Montpellier 
students ; and still more influence — and that not 
altogether a good one — must Rabelais' s lighter talk 
have had, as he lounged — so the story goes — in his 
dressing-gown upon the public place, picking up 
quaint stories from the cattle-drivers off the Cevennes, 
and the villagers who came in to sell their olives and 
their grapes, their vinegar and their vine-twig faggots, 
as they do unto this day. To him may be owing much 
of the sound respect for natural science, and much, 
too, of the contempt for the superstition around them, 
which is notable in that group of great naturalists who 
were boys in Montpellier at that day. Rabelais seems 
to have liked Rondelet, and no wonder : he was a 
cheery, lovable, honest little fellow, very fond of 
jokes, a great musician and player on the violin, and 
who, when he grew rich, liked nothing so well as to 
bring into his house any buffoon or strolling-player to 
make fun for him. Vivacious he was, hot-tempered, 
forgiving, and with a power of learning and a power 
of work which were prodigious, even in those hard- 
working days. Rabelais chaffs Rondelet, under the 
name of Rondibilis ; for, indeed, Rondelet grew up 

VOL, I.— h. e. y 



322 KONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 

into a very round, fat, little man ; but Rabelais puts 
excellent sense into bis mouth, cynical enough, and too 
cynical, but both learned and humorous; and, if be 
laugbs at bim for being shocked at the offer of a fee, 
and taking it, nevertheless, kindly enough, Rondelet is 
not the first doctor who has done that, neither will he 
be the last. 

Rondelet, in his turn, put on the red robe of the 
bachelor, and received, on taking his degree, his due 
share of fisticuffs from his dearest friends, according 
to the ancient custom of the University of Montpellier. 
He then went off to practise medicine in a village at 
the foot of the Alps, and, half-starved, to teach little 
children. Then he found he must learn Greek ; went 
off to Paris a second time, and alleviated his poverty 
there somewhat by becoming tutor to a son of the 
Viscomte de Turenne. There he met Gonthier of 
Andernach, who had taught anatomy at Louvain to 
the great Vesalius, and learned from him to dissect. 
We next find him setting up as a medical man amid 
the wild volcanic hills of the Auvergne, struggling 
still with poverty, like Erasmus, like George Buchanan, 
like almost every great scholar in those days; for 
students then had to wander from place to place, 
generally on foot, in search of new teachers, in search 
of books, in search of the necessaries of life ; under- 
going such an amount of bodily and mental toil as 
makes it wonderful that all of them did not — as 
some of them doubtless did — die under the hard 
training, or, at best, desert the penurious Muses for 
the paternal shop or plough. 

Rondelet got his doctorate in 1537, and next year 
fell in love with and married a beautiful young girl 



KONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 323 

called Jeanne Sandre, who seems to have been as poor 
as he. 

But he had gained, meanwhile, a powerful patron ; 
and the patronage of the great was then as necessary 
to men of letters as the patronage of the public is now. 
Guillaume PelUcier, Bishop of Maguelonne — or rather 
then of Montpellier itself, whither he had persuaded 
Paul II. to transfer the ancient see — was a model of the 
literary gentleman of the sixteenth century; a savant, a 
diplomat, a collector of books and manuscripts, Greek, 
Hebrew, and Syriac, which formed the original nucleus 
of the present library of the Louvre ; a botanist, too, 
who loved to wander with Rondelet collecting plants 
and flowers. He retired from public life to peace and 
science at Montpellier, when to the evil days of his 
master, Francis I., succeeded the still worse days of 
Henry II., and Diana of Poitiers. That Jezebel of 
France could conceive no more natural or easy way of 
atoning for her own sins than that of hunting down 
heretics, and feasting her wicked eyes — so it is said — 
upon their dying torments. Bishop Pellicier fell under 
suspicion of heresy : very probably with some justice. 
He fell, too, under suspicion of leading a life unworthy 
of a celibate churchman, a fault which — if it really 
existed — was, in those days, pardonable enough in an 
orthodox prelate, but not so in one whose orthodoxy 
was suspected. And for awhile Pellicier was in prison. 
After his release he gave himself up to science, with 
Rondelet and the school of disciples who were grow- 
ing up around him. They rediscovered together the 
Garum, that classic sauce, whose praises had been sung 
of old by Horace, Martial, and Ausonius ; and so child- 
like, superstitious if you will, was the reverence in 

T 2 



324 RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 

the sixteenth century for classic antiquity, that when 
Pellicier and Eondelet discovered that the Garum was 
made from the fish called Picarel — called Garon by 
the fishers of Antibes, and Giroli at Venice, both these 
last names corruptions of the Latin Gerres — then did 
the two fashionable poets of France, ^tienne Dolet 
and Clement Marot, think it not unworthy of their 
muse to sing the praises of the sauce which Horace 
had sung of old. A proud day, too, was it for Pellicier 
and Rondelet, when wandering somewhere in the 
marshes of the Camargue, a scent of garlic caught the 
nostrils of the gentle bishop, and in the lovely pink 
flowers of the water-germander he recognised the 
Scordium of the ancients. "The discovery/' says 
Professor Planchon, " made almost as much noise as 
that of the famous Garum; for at that moment of 
naive fervour on behalf of antiquity, to re- discover a 
plant of Dioscorides or of Pliny was a good fortune 
and almost an event." 

I know not whether, after his death, the good 
bishop's bones reposed beneath some gorgeous tomb, 
bedizened with the incongruous half -Pagan statues of 
the Kenaissance; but this at least is certain, that 
Rondelet's disciples imagined for him a monument 
more enduring than of marble or of brass, more 
graceful and more curiously wrought than all the 
sculptures of Torrigiano or Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli 
or Michael Angelo himself. For they named a lovely 
little lilac snapdragon, Linaria Domini Fellicerii — 
"Lord Pellicier's toad-flax;-" and that name it will 
keep, we may believe, as long as winter and summer 
shall endure. 

But to return. To this good Patron— who was the 
Ambassador at Venice — the newly-married Bondelet 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 325 

determined to apply for employment ; and to Venice 
he would have gone, leaving his bride behind, had he 
not been stayed by one of those angels who sometimes 
walk the earth in women's shape. Jeanne Sandre 
had an elder sister, Catharine, who had brought her 
up. She was married to a wealthy man, but she had 
no children of her own. For four years she and her 
good husband had let the Eondelets lodge with them, 
and now she was a widow, and to part with them was 
more than she could bear. She carried Rondelet off 
from the students who were seeing him safe out of 
the city, brought him back, settled on him the same 
day half her fortune, and soon after settled on him the 
whole, on the sole condition that she should live with 
him and her sister. For years afterwards she watched 
over the pretty young wife and her two girls and three 
boys — the three boys, alas ! all died young — and over 
Kondelet himself, who, immersed in books and experi- 
ments, was utterly careless about money ; and was to 
them all a mother — advising, guiding, managing, and 
regarded by Rondelet with genuine gratitude as his 
guardian angel. 

Honour and good fortune, in a worldly sense, now 
poured in upon the druggist's son. Pellicier, his own 
bishop, stood godfather to his first-born daughter. 
Montluc, Bishop of Valence, and that wise and learned 
statesman, the Cardinal of Tournon, stood godfathers a 
few years later to his twin boys ; and what was of still 
more solid worth to him, Cardinal Tournon took him 
to Antwerp, Bordeaux, Bayonne, and more than once 
to Rome; and in these Italian journeys of his he 
collected many facts for the great work of his life, 
that " History of Fishes " which he dedicated, naturally 
enough, to the cardinal. This book with its plates is, 



326 KONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 

for the time, a masterpiece of accuracy. Those who 
are best acquainted with the subject say, that it is up 
to the present day a key to the whole ichthyology of 
the Mediterranean. Two other men, Belon and 
Salviani, were then at work on the same subject, and 
published their books almost at the same time; a 
circumstance which caused, as was natural, a three- 
cornered duel between the supporters of the three 
naturalists, each party accusing the other of plagiarism. 
The simple fact seems to be that the almost simul-' 
taneous appearance of the three books in 1554-55 is 
one of those coincidences inevitable at moments when 
many minds are stirred in the same direction by the 
same great thoughts — coincidences which have hap- 
pened in our own day on questions of geology, biology, 
and astronomy ; and which, when the facts have been 
carefully examined,- and the first flush of natural 
jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that 
there were more wise men than one in the world at 
the same time. 

And this sixteenth century was an age in which 
the minds of men were suddenly and strangely turned 
to examine the wonders of nature with an earnest- 
ness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, 
with which they had never been investigated before. 
' ' Nature," says Professor Planchon, " long veiled in 
mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up infinite 
vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship 
of the ancients, was nearly hindering this movement 
of thought towards facts. Nevertheless, Learning did 
her work. She rediscovered, reconstructed, purified, 
commented on the texts of ancient authors. Then 
came in observation, which showed that more was to 
be seen in one blade of grass than in any page of 



ILONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 327 

Pliny. Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a 
man of transition, while he was one of progress. He 
reflected the past ; he opened and prepared the future. 
If he commented on Dioscorides, if he remained faith- 
ful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his ' History 
of Fishes ' a monument which our century respects. 
He is above all an inspirer, an initiator; and if he 
wants one mark of the leader of a school, the founda- 
tion of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his 
speech what is better than all systems, the communi- 
cative power which urges a generation of disciples 
along the path of independent research, with Reason 
for guide, and Faith for aim/ ; 

Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed 
in his house — for professors in those days took private 
pupils as lodgers — worked the group of botanists whom 
Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of the 
descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their 
names, and those of their disciples and their disciples 
again, are household words in the mouth of every 
gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in 
the plants that have been named after them. The 
Lobelia commemorates Lobel, one of Rondelet's most 
famous pupils, who wrote those " Adversaria " which 
contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's 
botanical expeditions, and who inherited his botanical 
(as Joubert his biographer inherited his anatomical) 
manuscripts. The Magnolia commemorates the 
Magnols ; the Sarracenia, Sarrasin of Lyons ; the 
Bauhinia, Jean Bauhin; the Fuchsia, Bauhin' s earlier 
German master, Leonard Fuchs ; and the Clusia — the 
received name of that terrible " Matapalo ,J or " Scotch 
attorney/ - ' of the West Indies, which kills the hugest 
tree, to become as huge a tree itself — immortalises 



328 RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 

the great Clusius, Charles de TEscluse, citizen of 
Arras, who, after studying civil law at Louvain, 
philosophy at Marburg, and theology at "Wittemberg 
under Melancthon, came to Montpellier in 1551, to 
li^e in Rondelet's own house, and become the greatest 
botanist of his age. 

These were Rondelet's palmy days. He had got a 
theatre of anatomy built at Montpellier, where he 
himself dissected publicly. He had, says tradition, 
a little botanic garden, such as were springing up then 
in several universities, specially in Italy. He had a 
villa outside the city, whose tower, near the modern 
railway station, still bears the name of the " Mas de 
Rondelet." There, too, may be seen the remnants 
of the great tanks, fed with water brought through 
earthen pipes from the Fountain of Albe, wherein he 
kept the fish whose habits he observed. Professor 
Planchon thinks that he had salt-water tanks like- 
wise; and thus he may have been the father of all 
u Aquariums.'" He had a large and handsome house 
in the city itself, a large practice as physician in the 
country round; money flowed in fast to him, and 
flowed out fast likewise. He spent much upon 
building, pulling down, rebuilding, and sent the bills 
in seemingly to his wife and to his guardian angel 
Catharine. He himself had never a penny in his 
purse : but earned the money, and let his ladies spend 
it ; an equitable and pleasant division of labour which 
most married men would do well to imitate. A 
generous, affectionate, careless little man, he gave 
away, says his pupil and biographer, Joubert, his 
valuable specimens to any savant who begged for 
them, or left them about to be stolen by visitors, who, 
like too many collectors in all ages, possessed light 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 329 

fingers and lighter consciences. So pacific was lie 
meanwhile, and so brave withal, that even in the 
fearful years of "The Troubles/' he would never carry 
sword, nor even tuck or dagger : but went about on 
the most lonesome journeys as one who wore a charmed 
life, secure in God and in his calling, which was to 
heal, and not to kill. 

These were the golden years of Rondelet's life ; but 
trouble was coming on him, and a stormy sunset after 
a brilliant day. He lost his sister-in-law, to whom he 
owed all his fortunes, and who had watched ever since 
over him and his wife like a mother ; then he lost his 
wife herself under most painful circumstances; then 
his best-beloved daughter. Then he married again, 
and lost the son who was born to him ; and then came, 
as to many of the best in those days, even sorer trials, 
trials of the conscience, trials of faith. 

For in the meantime Eondelet had become a Pro- 
testant, like many of the wisest men round him ; like, 
so it would seem from the event, the majority of the 
university and the burghers of Montpellier. It is not 
to be wondered at. Montpellier was a sort of halfway 
resting-place for Protestant preachers, whether fugitive 
or not, who were passing from Basle, Geneva, or Lyons, 
to Marguerite of Navarre's little Protestant court at 
Pau or at Nerac, where all wise and good men, and 
now and then some foolish and fanatical ones, found 
shelter and hospitality. Thither Calvin himself had 
been, passing probably through Montpellier, and leaving 
— as such a man was sure to leave — the mark of his 
foot behind him. At Lyons, no great distance up the 
Rhone, Marguerite had helped to establish an organised 
Protestant community; and when in 1536 she herself 
had passed through Montpellier, to visit her brother 



330 EONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 

at Valence, and Montmorency's camp at Avignon, she 
took with her doubtless Protestant chaplains of her 
own, who spoke wise words — it may be that she spoke 
wise words herself — to the ardent and inquiring students 
of Montpellier. Moreover, Eondelet and his disciples 
had been for years past in constant communication 
with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and 
Germany, among whom the knowledge of nature was 
progressing as it never had progressed before. For — 
it is a fact always to be remembered — it was only in 
the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences 
could grow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in 
Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the 
fifteenth century ; but they withered there again only 
too soon under the blighting upas shade of super- 
stition. Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, 
of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then half 
Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply 
because the air was free ; to be checked again in Prance 
by the return of superstition with despotism super- 
added, until the eve of the great French Revolution. 

So Eondelet had been for some years Protestant. 
He had hidden in his house for a long while a monk 
who had left his monastery. He had himself written 
theological treatises : but when his Bishop Pellicier 
was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt 
his manuscripts, and kept his opinions to himself. 
Still he was a suspected heretic, at last seemingly a 
notorious one ; for only the year before his death, 
going to visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid 
by the Spaniards, and had to get home through by- 
passes of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the 
Inquisition. 

And those were times in which it was necessary for 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 331 

a man to be careful, unless he had made up his mind 
to be burned. For more than thirty years of Rondelet's 
life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood; 
intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious 
fury being succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity 
and remorse ; but still the burnings had gone on. The 
Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the history 
of Languedoc, says, quite en passant, how someone 
was burnt at Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, 
for he had escaped to Geneva : but he adds, " next year 
they burned several heretics," it being not worth while 
to mention their names. In 1556 they burned alive at 
Toulouse Jean Bscalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who 
had found his order intolerable ; while one Pierre de 
Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of 
Nismes, was hanged and burnt. So had the score of 
judicial murders been increasing year by year, till it 
had to be, as all evil scores have to be in this world, 
paid off with interest, and paid off especially against 
the ignorant and fanatic monks who for a whole gene- 
ration, in every university and school in France, had 
been howling down sound science, as well as sound 
religion ; and at Montpellier in 1560-61, their debt was 
paid them in a very ugly way. News came down to 
the hot southerners of Languedoc of the so-called 
conspiracy of Amboise. — How the Due de Gruise and the 
Cardinal de Lorraine had butchered the best blood in 
France under the pretence of a treasonable plot ; how 
the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde had been 
arrested ; then how Conde and Coligny were ready to 
take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of 
France, and try to stop this life-long torturing, by 
sharp shot and cold steel ; then how in six months' 
time the king would assemble a general council to 



332 EONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 

settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots. 
The Huguenots, guessing how that would end, resolved 
to settle the question for themselves. They rose in 
one city after another, sacked the churches, destroyed 
the images, put down by main force superstitious pro- 
cessions and dances ; and did many things only to be 
excused by the exasperation caused by thirty years 
of cruelty. At Montpellier there was hard fighting, 
murders — so say the Catholic historians — of priests and 
monks, sack of the new cathedral, destruction of the 
noble convents which lay in a ring round Montpellier. 
The city and the university were in the hands of the 
Huguenots, and Montpellier became Protestant on the 
spot. 

Next year came the counter -blow. There were 
heavy battles with the Catholics all round the neigh- 
bourhood, destruction of the suburbs, threatened siege 
and sack, and years of misery and poverty for Mont- 
pellier and all who were therein. 

Horrible was the state of France in those times of 
the wars of religion which began in 1562 ; the times 
which are spoken of usually as " The Troubles/'' as if 
men did not wish to allude to them too openly. Then, 
and afterwards in the wars of the League, deeds were 
done for which language has no name. The popula- 
tion decreased. The land lay untilled. The fair face 
of France was blackened with burnt homesteads and 
ruined towns. Ghastly corpses dangled in rows upon 
the trees, or floated down the blood-stained streams. 
Law and order were at an end. Bands of robbers 
prowled in open day, and bands of wolves likewise. 
But all through the horrors of the troubles we catch 
sight of the little fat doctor riding all unarmed to see 
his patients throughout Languedoc; going vast dis- 



RONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATURALIST. 333 

tances, his biograpliers say, by means of regular 
relays of horses, till he too broke down. Well, for 
him, perhaps, that he broke down when he did ; for 
capture and recapture, massacre and pestilence, were 
the fate of Montpellier and the surrounding country, 
till the better times of Henry IV. and the Edict of 
Nantes in 1598, when liberty of worship was given to 
the Protestants for awhile. 

In the burning summer of 1566, Rondelet went a 
long journey to Toulouse, seemingly upon an errand of 
charity, to settle some law affairs for his relations. 
The sanitary state of the southern cities is bad enough 
still. It must have been horrible in those days of 
barbarism and misrule. Dysentery was epidemic at 
Toulouse then, and Rondelet took it. He knew from 
the first that he should die. He was worn out, it is 
said, by over- exertion ; by sorrow for the miseries of 
the land; by fruitless struggles to keep the peace, and 
to strive for moderation in days when men were all 
immoderate. But he rode away a day's journey — he 
took two days over it, so weak he was — in the blazing 
July sun, to a friend's sick wife at Realmont, and 
there took to his bed, and died a good man's death. 
The details of his death and last illness were written 
and published by his cousin Claude Formy ; and well 
worth reading they are to any man who wishes to 
know how to die. Rondelet would have no tidings of 
his illness sent to Montpellier. He was happy, he 
said, in dying away from the tears of his household, 
and "safe from insult." He dreaded, one may suppose, 
lest priests and friars should force their way to his 
bedside, and try to extort some recantation from the 
great savant, the honour and glory of their city. So 
they sent for no priest to Realmont ; but round his bed 



334 EONDELET, THE HUGUENOT NATUEALIST. 

a knot of Calvinist gentlemen and ministers read the 
Scriptures, and sang David's psalms, and prayed; and 
Rondelet prayed with, them through long agonies, and 
so went home to God. 

The Benedictine monk-historian of Languedoc, in 
all his voluminous folios, never mentions, as far as I 
can find, Rondelet's existence. Why should he ? The 
man was only a druggist's son and a heretic, who 
healed diseases, and collected plants, and wrote a 
book on fish. But the learned men of Montpellier, 
and of all Europe, had a very different opinion of him. 
His body was buried at Realmont; but before the 
schools of Toulouse they set up a white marble slab, 
and an inscription thereon setting forth his learning 
and his virtues ; and epitaphs on him were com- 
posed by the learned throughout Europe, not only in 
French and Latin, but in Greek, Hebrew, and even 
Chaldee. 

So lived and so died a noble man ; more noble, to 
my mind, than many a victorious warrior, or successful 
statesman, or canonised saint. To know facts, and to 
heal diseases, were the two objects of his life. For 
them he toiled, as few men have toiled ; and he died 
in harness, at his work — the best death any man 
can die. 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST.* 



I cannot begin a sketch of the life of this great man 
better than by trying to describe a scene so pictu- 
resque, so tragic in the eyes of those who are wont to 
mourn over human follies, so comic in the eyes of 
those who prefer to laugh over them, that the reader 
will not be likely to forget either it or the actors 
in it. 

It is a darkened chamber in the College of Alcala, 
in the year 1562, where lies, probably in a huge four- 
post bed, shrouded in stifling hangings, the heir- 
apparent of the greatest empire in the then world, Don 
Carlos, only son of Philip II. and heir-apparent of 
Spain, the Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short 
sickly boy of sixteen, with a bull head, a crooked 
shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will not 
be missed by the world if he should die. His profligate 
career seems to have brought its own punishment. To 
the scandal of his father, who tolerated no one's vices 
save his own, as well as to the scandal of the university 
authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets 
at the head of the most profligate students, insulting 
women, even ladies of rank, and amenable only to his 

* This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869a 
VOL. I. — H. E. z 



338 TESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of Valois, Isabel de 
la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter of 
Catherine de Medicis, and sister of the King of France. 
Don Carlos should have married her, had not his 
worthy father found it more advantageous for the 
crown of Spain, as well as more pleasant for him, 
Philip, to marry her himself. Whence came heart- 
burnings, rage, jealousies, romances, calumnies, of 
which two last — in as far at least as they concern poor 
Elizabeth — no wise man now believes a word. 

Going on some errand on which he had no business 
— there are two stories, neither of them creditable nor 
necessary to repeat — Don Carlos has fallen downstairs 
and broken his head. He comes, by his Portuguese 
mother's side, of a house deeply tainted with insanity ; 
and such an injury may have serious consequences. 
However, for nine days the wound goes on well, and 
Don Carlos, having had a wholesome fright, is, accord- 
ing to Doctor Olivarez, the medico de camara, a very 
good lad, and lives on chicken broth and dried plums. 
But on the tenth day comes on numbness of the left 
side, acute pains in the head, and then gradually 
shivering, high fever, erysipelas. His head and neck 
swell to an enormous size ; then comes raging delirium, 
then stupefaction, and Don Carlos lies as one dead. 

A modern surgeon would, probably, thanks to that 
training of which Vesalius may be almost called the 
father, have had little difficulty in finding out what was 
the matter with the luckless lad, and little difficulty in 
removing the evil, if it had not gone too far. But the 
Spanish physicians were then, as many of them are 
said to be still, as far behind the world in surgery as 
in other things ; and indeed surgery itself was then 
in its infancy, because men, ever since the early Greek 



VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 339 

schools of Alexandria had died oat, had been for cen- 
turies feeding their minds with anything rather than 
with facts. Therefore the learned morosophs who were 
gathered round Don Carlos's sick bed had become, 
according to their own confession, utterly confused, 
terrified, and at their wits' end. 

It is the 7th of May, the eighteenth day after the 
accident, according to Olivarez's story : he and Dr 
Yega have been bleeding the unhappy prince, enlarging 
the wound twice, and torturing him seemingly on mere 
guesses. "I believe/' says Olivarez, "that all was 
done well : but as I have said, in wounds in the head 
there are strange labyrinths. " So on the 7th they 
stand round the bed in despair. Don Garcia de Toledo, 
the prince's faithful governor, is sitting by him, worn 
out with sleepless nights, and trying to supply to the 
poor boy that mother's tenderness which he has never 
known. Alva, too, is there, stern, self-compressed, most 
terrible, and yet most beautiful. He has a God on 
earth, and that is Philip his master ; and though he 
has borne much from Don Carlos already, and will 
have to bear more, yet the wretched lad is to him as a 
son of God, a second deity, who will by right divine 
succeed to the inheritance of the first ; and he watches 
this lesser deity struggling between life and death with 
an intensity of which we, in these less loyal days, can 
form no notion. One would be glad to have a glimpse 
of what passed through that mind, so subtle and so 
ruthless, so disciplined and so loyal withal : but Alva 
was a man who was not given to speak his mind, but 
to act it. 

One would wish, too, for a glimpse of what was 
passing through the mind of another man, who has 
been daily in that sick chamber, according to Olivarez's 

z 2 



UO VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

statement, since the first of the month : but he is one 
who has had, for some years past, even more reason 
than Alva for not speaking his mind. What he looked 
like we know well, for Titian has painted him from the 
life — a tall, bold, well-dressed man, with a noble brain, 
square and yet lofty, short curling locks and beard, an 
eye which looks as though it feared neither man nor 
fiend — and it has had good reason to fear both — and 
features which would be exceeding handsome, but for 
the defiant snub-nose. That is Andreas Vesalius, of 
Brussels, dreaded and hated by the doctors of the old 
school — suspect, moreover, it would seem to inqui- 
sitors and theologians, possibly to Alva himself ; for he 
has dared to dissect human bodies ; he has insulted the 
medievalists at Paris, Padua, Bologna, Pisa, Venice, in 
open theatre ; he has turned the heads of all the young 
surgeons in Italy and France ; he has written a great 
book, with prints in it, designed, some say, by Titian 
— they were actually done by another Netherlander, 
John of Calcar, near Cleves — in which he has dared to 
prove that Galen's anatomy was at fault throughout, 
and that he had been describing a monkey's inside 
when he had pretended to be describing a man's ; and 
thus, by impudence and quackery, he has wormed 
himself — this Netherlander, a heretic at heart, as all 
Netherlander are, to God as well as to Galen — into 
the confidence of the late Emperor Charles V., and 
gone campaigning with him as one of his physicians, 
anatomising human bodies even on the battle-field, 
and defacing the likeness of Deity ; and worse than 
that, the most religious King Philip is deceived by 
him likewise, and keeps him in Madrid in wealth and 
honour ; and now, in the prince's extreme danger, the 
king has actually sent for him, and bidden him try 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 341 

his skill — a man who knows nothing save about bones 
and muscles and the outside of the body, and is 
unworthy the name of a true physician. 

One can conceive the rage of the old Spanish pedants 
at the Netherlander' s appearance, and still more at 
what followed, if we are to believe Hugo Bloet of Delft, 
his countryman and contemporary.* Vesalius, he says, 
saw that the surgeons had bound up the wound so tight 
that an abscess had formed outside the skull, which 
could not break : he asserted that the only hope lay 
in opening it; and did so, Philip having given leave, 
" by two cross-cuts. Then the lad returned to himself, 
as if awakened from a profound sleep, affirming that he 
owed his restoration to life to the German doctor."" 

Dionysius Daza, who was there with the other 
physicians and surgeons, tells a different story : " The 
most learned, famous, and rare Baron Vesalius," he 
says, advised that the skull should be trepanned ; but 
his advice was not followed. 

Olivarez's account agrees with that of Daza. They 
had opened the wounds, he says, down to the skull 
before Yesalius came. Vesalius insisted that the injury 
lay inside the skull, and wished to pierce it. Olivarez 
spends much labour in proving that Yesalius had " no 

* I owe this account of Bloet' s — which appears to me the only one 
trustworthy — to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, 
who finds it quoted from Bloet's "Acroama," in the " Observationum 
Medicarum Bariorum," lib. vii., of John Theodore Schenk. Those who 
wish to know several curious passages of Yesalius's life, which I have 
not inserted in this article, would do well to consult one by Professor 
Morley, " Anatomy in Long Clothes," in " Fraser's Magazine " for 
November, 1853. May I express a hope, which I am sure will be 
shared by all who have read Professor Morley's biographies of Jerome 
Carden and of Cornelius Agrippa, that he will find leisure to return 
to the study of Vesalius's life ; and will do for him what he has done 
for the two just-mentioned writers ? 



342 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

great foundation for his opinion : " but confesses that 
he never changed that opinion to the last, though all 
the Spanish doctors were against him. Then on the 
6th, he says, the Bachelor Torres came from Madrid, 
and advised that the skull should be laid bare once 
more ; and on the 7th, there being still doubt whether 
the skull was not injured, the operation was performed 
— by whom it is not said — but without any good 
result, or, according to Olivarez, any discovery, save 
that Vesalius was wrong, and the skull uninjured. 

Whether this second operation of the 7th of May 
was performed by Yesalius, and whether it was that of 
which Bloet speaks, is an open question. Olivarez's 
whole relation is apologetic, written to justify himself 
and his seven Spanish colleagues, and to prove Vesalius 
in the wrong. Public opinion, he confesses, had been 
very fierce against him. The credit of Spanish medicine 
was at stake : and we are not bound to believe im- 
plicitly a paper drawn up under such circumstances 
for Philip's eye. This., at least, we gather : that Don 
Carlos was never trepanned, as is commonly said ; and 
this, also, that whichever of the two stories is true, 
equally puts Yesalius into direct, and most unpleasant, 
antagonism to the Spanish doctors.* 

But Don Carlos still lay senseless ; and yielding to 
popular clamour, the doctors called in the aid of a 
certain Moorish doctor, from Valencia, named Priota- 
rete, whose unguents, it was reported, had achieved 
many miraculous cures. The unguent, however, to the 

* Olivarez's "Kelacion" is to be found in the Granvelle State 
Papers. For the general account of Don Carlos's illness, and of the 
miraculous agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, 
the general reader should consult Miss Frere's " Biography of 
Elizabeth of Valois," vol. i. pp. 307-19. 



VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 313 

horror of the doctors, burned the skull till the bone 
was as black as the colour of ink; and Olivarez 
declares he believes it to have been a preparation of 
pure caustic. On the morning of the 9th of May, the 
Moor and his unguents were sent away, " and went to 
Madrid, to send to heaven Hernando de Vega, while 
the prince went back to our method of cure. - " 

Considering what happened on the morning of the 
10th of May, we should now presume that the second 
opening of the abscess, whether by Vesalius or some- 
one else, relieved the pressure on the brain ; that a 
critical period of exhaustion followed, probably pro- 
longed by the Moor's premature caustic, which stopped 
the suppuration : but that God's good handiwork, called 
nature, triumphed at last ; and that therefore it came 
to pass that the prince was out of danger within 
three days of the operation. But he was taught, it 
seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different 
source from that of a German knife. For on the 
morning of the 9th, when the Moor was gone, and 
Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into 
his chamber a Deus e machind, or rather a whole 
pantheon of greater or lesser deities, who were to effect 
that which medical skill seemed not to have effected. 
Philip sent into the prince's chamber several of the 
precious relics which he usually carried about with 
him. The miraculous image of the Virgin of Atocha, 
in embroidering garments for whom, Spanish royalty, 
male and female, has spent so many an hour ere now, 
was brought in solemn procession and placed on an 
altar at the foot of the prince's bed ; and in the 
afternoon there entered, with a procession likewise, a 
shrine containing the bones of a holy anchorite, one 
Fray Diego, " whose life and miracles," says Olivarez, 



314 VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

"are so notorious : " and the bones of St. Justus and 
St. Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of Alcala. 
Amid solemn litanies the relics of Fray Diego were 
laid upon the prince's pillow, and the sudarium, or 
mortuary cloth, which had covered his face, was placed 
upon the prince's forehead. 

Modern science might object that the presence of 
so many personages, however pious or well intentioned, 
in a sick chamber on a hot Spanish May day, especially 
as the bath had been, for some generations past, held 
in religious horror throughout Spain, as a sign of 
Moorish and Mussulman tendencies, might have some- 
what interfered with the chances of the poor boy's 
recovery. Nevertheless the event seems to have 
satisfied Philip's highest hopes ; for that same night 
(so Don Carlos afterwards related) the holy monk 
Diego appeared to him in a vision, wearing the habit 
of St. Francis, and bearing in his hand a cross of 
reeds tied with a green band. The prince stated that 
he first took the apparition to be that of the blessed 
St. Francis ; but not seeing the stigmata, he exclaimed, 
" How ? Dost thou not bear the marks of the wounds ? " 
What he replied Don Carlos did not recollect ; save 
that he consoled him, and told him that he should not 
die of that malady. 

Philip had returned to Madrid, and shut himself 
up in grief in the great Jeronymite monastery. 
Elizabeth was praying for her step-son before the 
miraculous images of the same city. During the night 
of the 9th of May prayers went up for Don Carlos in 
all the churches of Toledo, Alcala, and Madrid. Alva 
stood all that night at the bed's foot. Don Garcia de 
Toledo sat in the arm-chair, where he had now sat 
night and day for more than a fortnight. The good 



YESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 345 

preceptor, Honorato Juan, afterwards Bishop of Osraa, 
wrestled in prayer for the lad the whole night through. 
His prayer was answered : probably it had been 
answered already, without his being aware of it. Be 
that as it may, about dawn Don Carlos' s heavy breath- 
ing ceased ; he fell into a quiet sleep ; and when he 
awoke all perceived at once that he was saved. 

He did not recover his sight, seemingly on account 
of the erysipelas, for a week more. He then opened 
his eyes upon the miraculous image of Atocha, and 
vowed that, if he recovered, he would give to the 
Virgin, at four different shrines in Spain, gold plate of 
four times his weight ; and silver plate of seven times 
his weight, when he should rise from his couch. So 
on the 6th of June he rose, and was weighed in a fur 
coat and a robe of damask, and his weight was three 
arrobas and one pound — seventy-six pounds in all. On 
the 14th of June he went to visit his father at the 
episcopal palace ; then to all the churches and shrines 
in Alcala, and of course to that of Fray Diego, whose 
body it is said he contemplated for some time with 
edifying devotion. The next year saw Fray Diego 
canonised as a saint, at the intercession of Philip and 
his son; and thus Don Carlos re-entered the world, to 
be a terror and a torment to all around him, and to 
die — not by Philip's cruelty, as his enemies reported 
too hastily indeed, yet excusably, for they knew 
him to be capable of any wickedness — but simply of 
constitutional insanity. 

And now let us go back to the history of " that 
most learned, famous, and rare Baron Vesalius," who 
had stood by and seen all these things done ; and try 
if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his 
early life, guess at some of his probable meditations on 



346 VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

tliis celebrated clinical case ; and guess also now those 
meditations may have affected seriously the events of 
his after life. 

Yesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at 
Brussels in 1513 or 1514. His father and grandfather 
had been medical men of the highest standing in a 
profession which then, as now, was commonly here- 
ditary. His real name was Wittag, an ancient family 
of Wesel, on the Khine, from which town either he 
or his father adopted the name of Yesalius, according 
to the classicising fashion of those days. Young 
Yesalius was sent to college at Louvain, where he 
learned rapidly. At sixteen or seventeen he knew not 
only Latin, but Greek enough to correct the proofs of 
Galen, and Arabic enough to become acquainted with 
the works of the Mussulman physicians. He was a 
physicist too, and a mathematician, according to the 
knowledge of those times ; but his passion — the study 
to which he was destined to devote his life — was 
anatomy. 

Little or nothing (it must be understood) had been 
done in anatomy since the days of Galen of Pergamos, 
in the second century after Christ, and very little even 
by him. Dissection was all but forbidden among the 
ancients. The Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, used to 
pursue with stones and curses the embalmers as soon 
as they had performed their unpleasant office; and 
though Herophilus and Erasistratus are said to have 
dissected many subjects under the protection of 
Ptolemy Soter in Alexandria itself : yet the public 
feeling of the Greeks as well as of the Romans con- 
tinued the same as that of the ancient Egyptians ; and 
Galen was fain — as Yesalius proved — to supplement 
his ignorance of the human frame by describing that 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 347 

of an ape. Dissection was equally forbidden among 
the Mussulmans ; and the great Arabic physicians 
could do no more than comment on Galen. The same 
prejudice extended through the Middle Age. Medical 
men were all clerks, clerici, and as such forbidden to 
shed blood. The only dissection, as far as I am aware, 
made during the Middle Age was one by Mundinus in 
1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen — 
for he dare allow his own eyes to see no more than 
Galen had seen before him — constituted the best 
anatomical manual in Europe till the middle of the 
fifteenth century. 

Then, in Italy at least, the classic Eenaissance gave 
fresh life to anatomy as to all other sciences. Especially 
did the improvements in painting and sculpture stir 
men up to a closer study of the human frame. Leonardo 
da Vinci wrote a treatise on muscular anatomy. The 
artist and the sculptor often worked together, and 
realised that sketch of Michael Augelo's in which he 
himself is assisting Fallopius, Vesalius's famous pupil, 
to dissect. Vesalius soon found that his thirst for 
facts could not be slaked by the theories of the Middle 
Age; so in 1530 he went off to Montpellier, where 
Francis I. had just founded a medical school, and 
where the ancient laws of the city allowed the faculty 
each year the body of a criminal. From thence, after 
becoming the fellow-pupil and the friend of Eondelet, 
and probably also of Rabelais and those other lumi- 
naries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay 
on Rondelet, he returned to Paris to study under old 
Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques Dubois, alias 
Jock o' the Wood ; and to learn less — as he complains 
himself — in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might 
learn in his shop. 



348 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

Were it not that the whole question of dissection 
is one over which it is right to draw a reverent veil, as 
a thing painful, however necessary and however in- 
nocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in 
many a reader by the stories which Yesalius himself 
tells of his struggles to learn anatomy. How old 
Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame from 
a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he 
could not find, or which ought to have been there, 
according to Galen, and were not; while young 
Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant's back was turned, 
took his place, and, to the delight of the students, 
found for him — provided it were there — what he could 
not find himself; — how he went body-snatching and 
gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when 
he and his friend were nearly torn to pieces by the 
cannibal dogs who haunted the Butte de Montfaucon, 
or place of public execution ; — how he acquired, by a 
long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton 
then in the world, and the hideous story of the robber 
to whom it had belonged — all these horrors those who 
list may read for themselves elsewhere. I hasten past 
them with this remark — that to have gone through the 
toils, dangers, and disgusts which Yesalius faced, 
argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no 
common physical and moral courage, and a deep con- 
science that he was doing right, and must do it at all 
risks in the face of a generation which, peculiarly 
reckless of human life and human agony, allowed that 
frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, 
maimed, desecrated in every way while alive ; and 
yet — straining at the gnat after having swallowed the 
camel — forbade it to be examined when dead, though 
for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind. 






VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 349 

The breaking out of war between Francis I. and 
Charles V. drove Yesalius back to his native country 
and Louvain ; and in 1535 we hear of him as a 
surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most pro- 
bably, the Emperor's invasion of Provence, and the 
disastrous retreat from before Montmorency's fortified 
camp at Avignon, through a country in which that 
crafty general had destroyed every article of human 
food, except the half-ripe grapes. He saw, perhaps, 
the Spanish soldiers, poisoned alike by the sour fruit 
and by the blazing sun, falling in hundreds along the 
white roads which led back into Savoy, murdered by 
the peasantry whose homesteads had been destroyed, 
stifled by the weight of their own armour, or des- 
perately putting themselves, with their own hands, out 
of a world which had become intolerable. Half the 
army perished. Two thousand corpses lay festering 
between Aix and Erejus alone. If young Yesalius 
needed " subjects/' the ambition and the crime of 
man found enough for him in those blazing September 
days. 

He went to Italy, probably with the remnants of 
the army. Where could he have rather wished to find 
himself ? He was at last in the country where the 
human mind seemed to be growing young once more ; 
the country of revived arts, revived sciences, learning, 
languages ; and — though, alas ! only for awhile — of 
revived free thought, such as Europe had not seen 
since the palmy days of Greece. Here at least he 
would be appreciated; here at least he would bo 
allowed to think and speak : and he was appreciated. 
The Italian cities, who were then, like the Athenians 
of old, u spending their time in nothing else save to 
hear or to tell something new," welcomed the brave 



350 VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

young Fleming and his novelties. Within two years 
he was professor of anatomy at Padua, then the first 
school in the world; then at Bologna and at Pisa 
at the same time ; last of all at Venice, where Titian 
painted that portrait of him which remains unto this 
day. 

These years were for him a continual triumph; 
everywhere, as he demonstrated on the human body, 
students crowded his theatre, or hung round him as 
he walked the streets ; professors left their own chairs 
— their scholars having deserted them already — to go 
and listen humbly or enviously to the man who could 
give them what all brave souls throughout half Europe 
were craving for, and craving in vain — facts. And so, 
year after year, was realised that scene which stands 
engraved in the frontispiece of his great book — where, 
in the little quaint Cinquecento theatre, saucy scholars, 
reverend doctors, gay gentlemen, and even cowled 
monks, are crowding the floor, peeping over each 
other's shoulders, hanging on the balustrades; while 
in the centre, over his " subject" — which one of those 
same cowled monks knew but too well — stands young 
Vesalius, upright, proud, almost defiant, as one who 
knows himself safe in the impregnable citadel of fact ; 
and in his hand the little blade of steel, destined — 
because wielded in obedience to the laws of nature, 
which are the laws of God — to work more benefit for 
the human race than all the swords which were drawn 
in those days, or perhaps in any other, at the bid- 
ding of most Catholic Emperors and most Christian 
Kings. 

Those were indeed days of triumph for Vesalius ; 
of triumph deserved, because earned by patient and 
accurate toil in a good cause : but Vesalius, being but 



VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 351 

a mortal man, may have contracted in those same 
days a temper of imperiousness and self-conceit, such 
as he showed afterwards when his pupil Fallopius 
dared to add fresh discoveries to those of his master. 
And yet, in spite of all Vesalius knew, how little he 
knew ! How humbling to his pride it would have 
been had he known then — perhaps he does know now 
— that he had actually again and again walked, as it 
were, round and round the true theory of the circula- 
tion of the blood, and yet never seen it; that that 
discovery which, once made, is intelligible, as far as 
any phenomenon is intelligible, to the merest peasant, 
was reserved for another century, and for one of those 
Englishmen on whom Yesalius would have looked as 
semi-barbarians. 

To make a long story short : three years after the 
publication of his famous book, " De Corporis Humani 
Fabrica/' he left Venice to cure Charles V., at 
Regensburg, and became one of the great Emperor's 
physicians. 

This was the crisis of Ves alius' s life. The medicine 
with which he had worked the cure was China — 
Sarsaparilla, as we call it now — brought home from 
the then newly-discovered banks of the Paraguay 
and Uruguay, where its beds of tangled vine, they 
say, tinge the clear waters a dark-brown like that of 
peat, and convert whole streams into a healthful and 
pleasant tonic. On the virtues of this China (then 
supposed to be a root) Vesalius wrote a famous little 
book, into which he contrived to interweave his 
opinions on things in general, as good Bishop 
Berkeley did afterwards into his essay on the virtues 
of tar-water. Into this book, however, Vesalius in- 
troduced — as Bishop Berkeley did not — much, and 



352 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

perhaps too much, about himself; and much, though 
perhaps not too much, about poor old Galen, and his 
substitution of an ape's inside for that of a human 
being. The storm which had been long gathering 
burst upon him. The old school, trembling for 
their time-honoured reign, bespattered, with all that 
pedantry, ignorance, and envy could suggest, the man 
who dared not only to revolutionise surgery, but to 
interfere with the privileged mysteries of medicine ; 
and, over and above, to become a greater favourite at 
the court of the greatest of monarchs. While such 
as Eustachius, himself an able discoverer, could join 
in the cry, it is no wonder if a lower soul, like that 
of Sylvius, led it open-mouthed. He was a mean, 
covetous, bad man, as George Buchanan well knew ; 
and, according to his nature, he wrote a furious book 
— " Ad Yesani calumnias depulsandas/' The pun- 
ning change of Vesalius into Vesanus (madman) was 
but a fair and gentle stroke for a polemic, in days 
in which those who could not kill their enemies 
with steel or powder, held themselves justified in 
doing so, if possible, by vituperation, calumny, and 
every engine of moral torture. But a far more 
terrible weapon, and one which made Yesalius rage, 
and it may be for once in his life tremble, was the 
charge of impiety and heresy. The Inquisition was a 
very ugly place. It was very easy to get into it, 
especially for a Netherlander : but not so easy to get 
out. Indeed Yesalius must have trembled, when he 
saw his master, Charles Y., himself take fright, and 
actually call on the theologians of Salamanca to decide 
whether it was lawful to dissect a human body. The 
monks, to their honour, used their common sense, 
and answered Yes. The deed was so plainly useful 



VES ALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 353 

that it must be lawful likewise. Bat Vesalius did 
not feel that he had triumphed. He dreaded, pos- 
sibly, lest the storm should only have blown over for 
a time. He fell, possibly, into hasty disgust at the 
folly of mankind, and despair of arousing them to 
use their common sense, and acknowledge their true 
interest and their true benefactors. At all events, he 
threw into the fire — so it is said — all his unpublished 
manuscripts, the records of long years of observation, 
and renounced science thenceforth. 

We hear of him after this at Brussels, and at 
Basle likewise — in which latter city, in the company 
of physicians, naturalists, and Grecians, he must have 
breathed awhile a freer air. But he seems to have 
returned thence to his old master Charles V., and to 
have finally settled at Madrid as a court surgeon to 
Philip II., who sent him, but too late, to extract the 
lance splinters from the eye of the dying Henry II. 

He was now married to a lady of rank from Brussels, 
Anne van Hamme by name; and their daughter 
married in time Philip II /s grand falconer, who was 
doubtless a personage of no small social rank. Yesalius 
was well off in worldly things ; somewhat fond, it is 
said, of good living and of luxury ; inclined, it may 
be, to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
we die," and to sink more and more into the mere 
worldling, unless some shock should awake him from 
his lethargy. 

And the awakening shock did come. After eight 
years of court life, he resolved, early in the year 1561, 
to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 

The reasons for so strange a determination are 
wrapped in mystery and contradiction. The common 
story was that he had opened a corpse to ascertain 

vol. i. — h. e. 2 a 



354 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

the cause of death, and that, to the horror of the 
bystanders, the heart was still seen to beat ; that his 
enemies accused him to the Inquisition, and that he 
was condemned to death, a sentence which was com- 
muted to that of going on pilgrimage. But here, 
at the very outset, accounts differ. One says that 
the victim was a nobleman, name not given ; another 
that it was a lady's maid, name not given. It is most 
improbable, if not impossible, that Vesalius, of all 
men, should have mistaken a living body for a dead 
one; while it is most probable, on the other hand, 
that his medical enemies would gladly raise such a 
calumny against him, when he was no longer in Spain 
to contradict it. Meanwhile Llorente, the historian 
of the Inquisition, makes no mention of Vesalius 
having been brought before its tribunal, while he 
does mention Vesalius' s residence at Madrid. Another 
story is, that he went abroad to escape the bad temper 
of his wife ; another that he wanted to enrich himself. 
Another story — and that not an unlikely one — is, 
that he was jealous of the rising reputation of his 
pupil Fallopius, then professor of anatomy at Venice. 
This distinguished surgeon, as I said before, had 
written a book, in which he added to Vesalius's dis- 
coveries, and corrected certain of his errors. Vesalius 
had answered him hastily and angrily, quoting his 
anatomy from memory ; for, as he himself complained, 
he could not in Spain obtain a subject for dissection; 
not even, he said, a single skull. He had sent his 
book to Venice to be published, and had heard, seem- 
ingly, nothing of it. He may have felt that he was 
falling behind in the race of science, and that it was 
impossible for him to carry on his studies in Madrid ; 
and so, angry with his own laziness and luxury, he 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 355 

may have felt tlie old sacred fire flash up in him, and 
have determined to go to Italy and become a student 
and a worker once more. 

The very day that he set out, Clusius of Arras, 
then probably the best botanist in the world, arrived 
at Madrid ; and, asking the reason of Vesalius's depar- 
ture, was told by their fellow-countryman, Charles de 
Tisnacq, procurator for the affairs of the Netherlands, 
that Vesalius had gone of his own free will, and with 
all facilities which Philip could grant him, in perform- 
ance of a vow which he had made during a dangerous 
illness. Here, at least, we have a drop of information, 
which seems taken from the stream sufficiently near 
to the fountain-head : but it must be recollected 
that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may 
have found it necessary to walk warily in them ; that 
through him had been sent, only the year before, that 
famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and 
Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's 
fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands 
which sprung out of that letter was coming fast ; and 
that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with 
Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat 
loose on his shoulders; especially if he had heard 
Alva say, as he wrote, ' ' that every time he saw the 
despatches of those three senors, they moved his 
choler so, that if he did not take much care to temper 
it, he would seem a frenzied man.-" In such times, 
De Tisnacq may have thought good to return a 
diplomatic answer to a fellow-countryman concern- 
ing a third fellow-countryman, especially when that 
countryman, as a former pupil of Melancthon at 
Wittemberg, might himself bo under suspicion of 
heresy, and therefore of possible treason. 

2 a 2 



356 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

Be this as it may, one cannot but suspect some 
strain of truth in the story about the Inquisition; 
for, whether or not Yesalius operated on Don Carlos, 
he had seen with his own eyes that miraculous Virgin 
of Atocha at the bed's foot of the prince. He had 
heard his recovery attributed, not to the operation, 
but to the intercession of Fray, now Saint Diego ; * 
and he must have had his thoughts thereon, and 
may, in an unguarded moment, have spoken them. 

For he was, be it always remembered, a Nether- 
lander. The crisis of his country was just at hand. 
Eebellion was inevitable, and, with rebellion, horrors 
unutterable; and, meanwhile, Don Carlos had set his 
mad brain on having the command of the Netherlands. 
In his rage at not having it, as all the world knows, 
he nearly killed Alva with his own hands, some two 
years after. If it be true that Don Carlos felt a 
debt of gratitude to Vesalius, he may (after his wont) 
have poured out to him some wild confidence about 
the Netherlands, to have even heard which would be a 
crime in Philip's eyes. And if this be but a fancy, 
still Vesalius was, as I just said, a Netherlander, and 
one of a brain and a spirit to which Philip's doings, 
and the air of the Spanish court, must have been 
growing ever more and more intolerable. Hundreds 
of his country folk, perhaps men and women whom he 
had known, were being racked, burnt alive, buried 
alive, at the bidding of a jocular ruffian, Peter Titel- 
mann, the chief inquisitor. The "day of the mau- 

* In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said that, while 
he allows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray 
Diego, and of " many just persons," he cannot allow that there was 
any "miracle properly so called," because the prince was cured 
according to " natural order," and by " experimental remedies " of 
the physicians. 



VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 357 

brulez" and the wholesale massacre which followed it, 
had happened but two years before; and, by all the signs 
of the times, these murders and miseries were certain 
to increase. And why were all these poor wretches 
suffering the extremity of horror, but because they 
would not believe in miraculous images, and bones of 
dead friars, and the rest of that science of unreason 
and unfact, against which Vesalius had been fighting 
all his life, consciously or not, by using reason and 
observing fact ? What wonder if, in some burst of 
noble indignation and just contempt, he forgot a 
moment that he had sold his soul, and his love of 
science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet uneasy, hanger- 
on at the tyrant's court ; and spoke unadvisedly some 
word worthy of a German man ? 

As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his 
wife, there may be a grain of truth in it likewise. 
Vesalius's religion must have sat very lightly on him. 
The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets 
from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of 
apparitions and demons. He had handled too many 
human bones to care much for those of saints. He 
was probably, like his friends of Basle, Montpellier, and 
Paris, somewhat of a heretic at heart, probably some- 
what of a pagan, while his lady, Anne van Hamme, 
was probably a strict Catholic, as her father, being a 
councillor and master of the exchequer at Brussels, was 
bound to be ; and freethinking in the husband, crossed 
by superstition in the wife, may have caused in them 
that wretched vie a ^art, that want of any true com- 
munion of soul, too common to this day in Catholic 
countries. 

Be these things as they may — and the exact truth 
of them will now be never known — Vesalius set out 



358 VESALIUS THE ANATOMIST. 

to Jerusalem in the spring of 1564. On his way lie 
visited his old friends at Venice to see about his book 
against Eallopius. The Venetian republic received 
the great philosopher with open arms. Eallopius was 
just dead; and the senate offered their guest the 
vacant chair of anatomy. He accepted it : but went 
on to the East. 

He never occupied that chair; wrecked upon the 
Isle of Zante, as he was sailing back from Palestine, 
he died miserably of fever and want, as thousands of 
pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had died 
before him. A goldsmith recognised him ; buried 
him in a chapel of the Virgin ; and put up over him a 
simple stone, which remained till late years ; and may 
remain, for aught I know, even now. 

So perished, in the prime of life, " a martyr to his 
love of science/' to quote the words of M. Burggraeve 
of Ghent, his able biographer and commentator, "the 
prodigious man, who created a science at an epoch 
when everything was still an obstacle to his progress ; 
a man whose whole life was a long struggle of know- 
ledge against ignorance, of truth against lies." 

Plaudite : Exeat : with Rondelet and Buchanan. 
And whensoever this poor foolish world needs three 
such men, may God of His great mercy send them. 



PARACELSUS. 



PARACELSUS, 



I told you of Vesalius and Rondelet as specimens of 
the men who three hundred years ago were founding 
the physical science of the present day, by patient 
investigation of facts. But such an age as this would 
naturally produce men of a very different stamp, men 
who could not imitate their patience and humility; 
who were trying for royal roads to knowledge, and to 
the fame and wealth which might be got out of know- 
ledge ; who meddled with vain dreams about the occult 
sciences, alchemy, astrology, magic, the cabala, and so 
forth, who were reputed magicians, courted and feared 
for awhile, and then, too often, died sad deaths. 

Such had been, in the century before, the famous 
Dr. Faust — Faustus, who was said to have made 
a compact with Satan — actually one of the inventors 
of printing — immortalised in Goethe's marvellous 
poem. 

Such, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was 
Cornelius Agrippa — a doctor of divinity and a knight- 
at-arms ; secret-service diplomatist to the Emperor 
Maximilian in Austria; astrologer, though unwilling*, to 
his daughter Margaret, Eegent of the Low Countries ; 

* This lecture was given at Cambridge in 18G9, and has not had 
the benefit of the author's corrections for the press. 



362 PARACELSUS. 

writer on the occult sciences and of the famous "De 
VanitateScientiarum," and what not ? who died miserably 
at the age of forty-nine, accused of magic by the Do- 
minican monks from whom he had rescued a poor girl, 
who they were torturing on a charge of witchcraft; and 
by them hunted to death ; nor to death only, for they 
spread the fable — such as you may find in Delrio the 
Jesuit's " Disquisitions on Magic "* — that his little pet 
black dog was a familiar spirit, as Butler has it in 
"Hudibras": 

Agrippa kept a Stygian pug 
P the garb and habit of a dog — ■ 
That was his taste ; and the cur 
Eead to th' occult philosopher, 
And taught him subtly to maintain 
All other sciences are vain. 

Such also was Jerome Cardan, the Italian scholar 
and physician, the father of algebraic -science (you all 
recollect Cardan's rule), believer in dreams, prognostics, 
astrology; who died, too, miserably enough, in old age. 

Cardan's sad life, and that of Cornelius Agrippa, 
you can, and ought to read for yourselves, in two 
admirable biographies, as amusing as they are learned, 
by Professor Morley, of the London University. I 
have not chosen either of them as a subject for this 
lecture, because Mr. Morley has so exhausted what is 
to be known about them, that I could tell you nothing 
which I had not stolen from him. 

But what shall I say of the most famous of these 
men — Paracelsus ? whose name you surely know. He 
too has been immortalised in a poem which you all 
ought to have read, one of Robert Browning's earliest 
and one of his best creations. 

* Delrio's book, a famous one in its day, was published about 1612. 



PARACELSUS. 363 

I think we must accept as true Mr. Browning's 
interpretation of Paracelsus's character. We must 
believe that he was at first an honest and high-minded, 
as he was certainly a most gifted, man ; that he went 
forth into the world, with an intense sense of the worth- 
lessness of the sham knowledge of the pedants and 
quacks of the schools; an intense belief that some 
higher and truer science might be discovered, by which 
diseases might be actually cured, and health, long life, 
happiness, all but immortality, be conferred on man; 
an intense belief that he, Paracelsus, was called and 
chosen by God to find out that great mystery, and be 
a benefactor to all future ages. That fixed idea might 
degenerate — did, alas ! degenerate — into wild self- 
conceit, rash contempt of the ancients, violent abuse 
of his opponents. But there was more than this in 
Paracelsus. He had one idea to which, if he had kept 
true, his life would have been a happier one — the firm 
belief that all pure science was a revelation from God ; 
that it was not to be obtained at second or third hand, 
by blindly adhering to the words of Galen or Hippo- 
crates or Aristotle, and putting them (as the scholastic 
philosophers round him did) in the place of God : but 
by going straight to nature at first hand, and listening 
fco what Bacon calls i( the voice of God revealed in 
facts." True and noble is the passage with which he 
begins his " Labyrinthus Medicorum," one of his 
attacks on the false science of his day, 

" The first and highest book of all healing/' he 
says, " is called wisdom, and without that book no man 
will carry out anything good or useful . . . And that 
book is God Himself. For in Him alone who hath 
created all things, the knowledge and principle of all 
things dwells . . . without Him all is folly. As the sun 



364 PAEACELSUS. 

shines on us from above, so He must pour into us from 
above all arts whatsoever. Therefore the root of all 
learning and cognition is, that we should seek first 
the kingdom of God — the kingdom of God in which 
all sciences are founded. ... If any man think that 
nature is not founded on the kingdom of God, he knows 
nothing about it. All gifts/' he repeats again and 
again, confused and clumsily (as is his wont), but with 
a true earnestness, "are from God." 

The true man of science, with Paracelsus, is he who 
seeks first the kingdom of God in facts, investigating 
nature reverently, patiently, in faith believing that 
God, who understands His own work best, will make 
him understand it likewise. The false man of science 
is he who seeks the kingdom of this world, who cares 
nothing about the real interpretation of facts : but is con- 
tent with such an interpretation as will earn him the good 
things of this world — the red hat and gown, the ambling 
mule, the silk clothes, the partridges, capons, and 
pheasants, the gold florins chinking in his palm. At such 
pretenders Paracelsus sneered, at last only too fiercely, 
not only as men whose knowledge consisted chiefly in 
wearing white gloves, but as rogues, liars, villains, and 
every epithet which his very racy vocabulary, quickened 
(it is to be feared) by wine and laudanum, could suggest. 
With these he contrasts the true men of science. It is 
difficult for us now to understand how a man setting 
out in life with such pure and noble views should 
descend at last (if indeed he did descend) to be a quack 
and a conjuror — and die under the imputation that 

Bombastes kept a devil's bird 
Hid in the pommel of his sword, 

and have, indeed, his very name, Bombast, used to 



PAEACELSUS. 365 

this day as a synonym of loud, violent, and empty talk. 
To understand it at all, we mast go back and think a 
little over these same occult sciences which were be- 
lieved in by thousands during the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries. 

The reverence for classic antiquity, you must un- 
derstand, which sprang up at the renaissance in the 
fifteenth century, was as indiscriminating as it was 
earnest. Men caught the trash as well as the jewels. 
They put the dreams of the Neoplatonists, Iam- 
blicus, Porphyry, or Plotinus, or Proclus, on the same 
level as the sound dialectic philosophy of Plato him- 
self. And these Neoplatonists were all, more or less, 
believers in magic — Theurgy, as it was called — in 
the power of charms and spells, in the occult virtues 
of herbs and gems, in the power of adepts to evoke 
and command spirits, in the significance of dreams, 
in the influence of the stars upon men's characters 
and destinies. If the great and wise philosopher Iam- 
blicus believed such things, why might not the men 
of the sixteenth century? 

And so grew up again in Europe a passion for what 
were called the Occult sciences. It had always been 
haunting the European imagination. Medieval monks 
had long ago transformed the poet Virgil into a great 
necromancer. And there were immense excuses for 
such a belief. There was a mass of collateral evidence 
that the occult sciences were true, which it was im- 
possible then to resist. Races far more ancient, learned, 
civilised, than any Frenchman, German, Englishman, 
or even Italian, in the fifteenth century had believed 
in these things. The Moors, the best physicians of the 
Middle Ages, had their heads full, as the <e Arabian 
Nights " prove, of enchanters, genii, peris, and what 



366 PARACELSUS. 

not ? The Jewish rabbis had their Cabala, which sprang 
up in Alexandria, a system of philosophy founded on 
the mystic meaning of the words and the actual letters 
of the text of Scripture, which some said was given by 
the angel Ragiel to Adam in Paradise, by which Adam 
talked with angels, the sun and moon, summoned 
spirits, interpreted dreams, healed and destroyed ; and 
by that book of Ragiel, as it was called, Solomon 
became the great magician and master of all the spirits 
and their hoarded treasures. 

So strong, indeed, was the belief in the mysteries of 
the Cabala, that Reuchlin,the restorer of Hebrew learn- 
ing in Germany, and Pico di Mirandola, the greatest 
of Italian savants., accepted them; and not only Pope 
Leo X. himself, but even statesmen and warriors re- 
ceived with delight R,euchlm ; s cabalistic treatise, " De 
Verbo Mirifico/' on the mystic word " Schemham- 
phorash" — that hidden name of God, which whosoever 
can pronounce aright is, for the moment, lord of 
nature and of all daemons. 

Amulets, too, and talismans; the faith in them was 
exceeding ancient. Solomon had his seal, by which he 
commanded all daemons ; and there is a whole literature 
of curious nonsense, which you may read if you will, 
about the Abraxas and other talismans of the Gnostics 
in Syria ; and another, of the secret virtues which were 
supposed to reside in gems : especially in the old Roman 
and Greek gems, carved into intaglios with figures of 
heathen gods and goddesses. Lapidaria, or lists of 
these gems and their magical virtues, were not un- 
common in the Middle Ages. You may read a great 
deal that is interesting about them at the end of 
Mr. King's book on gems. 

Astrology too; though Pico di Mirandola might 



PARACELSUS. 367 

set himself against the rest of the world, few were found 
daring enough to deny so ancient a science. Luther 
and Melancthon merely followed the regular tradition of 
public opinion when they admitted its truth. It sprang 
probably from the worship of the Seven Planets by 
the old Chaldees. It was brought back from Babylon 
by the Jews after the Captivity, and spread over all 
Europe — perhaps all Asia likewise. 

The rich and mighty of the earth must needs have 
their nativities cast, and consult the stars ; and Cor- 
nelius Agrippa gave mortal offence to the Queen- 
Dowager of France (mother of Francis I.) because, 
when she compelled him to consult the stars about 
Francis's chance of getting out of his captivity in 
Spain after the battle of Pavia, he wrote and spoke 
his mind honestly about such nonsense. 

Even Newton seems to have hankered after it 
when young. Among his MSS. in Lord Portsmouth's 
library at Hurstbourne are whole folios of astrologic 
calculations. It went on till the end of the seven- 
teenth century, and died out only when men had 
begun to test it, and all other occult sciences, by 
experience, and induction founded thereon. 

Countless students busied themselves over the 
transmutation of metals. As for magic, necromancy, 
pyromancy, geomancy, coscinomancy, and all the other 
mancies — there was then a whole literature about 
them. And the witch-burning inquisitors like Sprenger, 
Bodin, Delrio, and the rest, believed as firmly in 
the magic powers of the poor wretches whom they 
tortured to death, as did, in many cases, the poor 
wretches themselves. 

Everyone, almost, believed in magic. Take two 
cases. Read the story which Benvenuto Cellini, the 



36S PARACELSUS. 

sculptor, tells in his life (everyone should read it) of 
the magician whom he consults in the Coliseum at 
Rome, and the figure which he sees as he walks 
back with the magician, jumping from roof to roof 
along the tiles of the houses. 

And listen to this story, which Mr. Froude has 
dug up in his researches. A Church commissioner at 
Oxford, at the beginning of the Reformation, being 
unable to track an escaped heretic, " caused a figure to 
be made by an expert in astronomy;" by which it was 
discovered that the poor wretch had fled in a tawny 
coat and was making for the sea. Conceive the 
respected head of your College — or whoever he may 
be — in case you slept out all night without leave, 
going to a witch to discover whether you had gone to 
London or to Huntingdon, and then writing solemnly 
to inform the Bishop of Ely of his meritorious 
exertions ! 

In such a mad world as this was Paracelsus born. 
The son of a Swiss physician, but of noble blood, Philip 
Aureolus Theophrastus was his Christian name, Bom- 
bast von Hohenheim his surname, which last word he 
turned, after the fashion of the times, into Paracelsus. 
Born in 1493 at Einsiedeln (the hermitage), in Schweiz, 
which is still a famous place of pilgrimage, he was 
often called Eremita — the hermit. Erasmus, in a letter 
still extant, but suspected not to be genuine, addressed 
him by that name. 

How he passed the first thirty-three years of his 
life it is hard to say. He used to boast that he had 
wandered over all Europe, been in Sweden, Italy, 
in Constantinople, and perhaps in the far East, with 
barber - surgeons, alchemists, magicians, haunting 
mines, and forges of Sweden and Bohemia, especially 



PAKACELSUS. 369 

those which the rich merchants of that day had in 
the Tyrol. 

It was from that work, he said, that he learnt what 
he knew : from the study of nature and of facts. He 
had heard all the learned doctors and professors ; he 
had read all their books, and they could teach him 
nothing. Medicine was his monarch, and no one else. 
He declared that there was more wisdom under his 
bald pate than in Aristotle and Galen, Hippocrates and 
Rhasis. And fact seemed to be on his side. He re- 
appeared in Germany about 1525, and began working 
wondrous cures. He had brought back with him from 
the East an arcanum, a secret remedy, and laudanum 
was its name. He boasted, says one of his enemies, 
that he could raise the dead to life with it ; and so the 
event all but proved. Basle was then the university 
where free thought and free creeds found their safest 
home ; and hither CEcolampadius the reformer invited 
young Paracelsus to lecture on medicine and natural 
science. 

It would have been well for him, perhaps, had he 
never opened his lips. He might have done good 
enough to his fellow-creatures by his own undoubted 
powers of healing. He cured John Frobenius, the 
printer, Erasmus's friend, at Basle, when the doctors 
were going to cut his leg off. His fame spread far 
and wide. Round Basle and away into Alsace 
he was looked on, even an enemy says, as a new 
iEsculapius. 

But these were days in which in a university every- 
one was expected to talk and teach, and so Paracelsus 
began lecturing; and then the weakness which was 
mingled with his strength showed itself. He began by 
burning openly the books of Galen and Avicenna, and 
vol. i. — h. e. 2 b 



370 PAEAOELSUS. 

declared that all the old knowledge was useless. 
Doctors and students alike must begin over again 
with him. The dons were horrified. To burn Galen 
and Avicenna was as bad as burning the Bible. 
And more horrified still were they when Paracelsus 
began lecturing, not in the time-honoured dog-Latin, 
but in good racy German, which everyone could 
understand. They shuddered under their red gowns 
and hats. If science was to be taught in German, 
farewell to the Galenists* formulas, and their lucra- 
tive monopoly of learning. Paracelsus was bold 
enough to say that he wished to break up their 
monopoly; to spread a popular knowledge of medi- 
cine. " How much/' he wrote once, " would I 
endure and suffer, to see every man his own shepherd 
— his own healer." He laughed to scorn their long 
prescriptions, used the simplest drugs, and declared 
Nature, after all, to be the best physician — as 
a dog, he says, licks his wound well again without 
our help ; or as the broken rib of the ox heals of its 
own accord. 

Such a man was not to be endured. They hated 
him, he says, for the same reason that they hated Luther, 
for the same reason that the Pharisees hated Christ. 
He met their attacks with scorn, rage, and language as 
coarse and violent as their own. The coarseness and 
violence of those days seem incredible to us now; 
and, indeed, Paracelsus, as he confessed himself, was, 
though of gentle blood, rough and unpolished ; and 
utterly, as one can see from his writings, unable to 
give and take, to conciliate — perhaps to pardon. He 
looked impatiently on these men who were (not un- 
reasonably) opposing novelties which they could not 
understand; as enemies of God, who were balking 



PARACELSUS. 371 

him in his grand plan for regenerating science and 
alleviating the woes of humanity, and he outraged 
their prejudices instead of soothing them. 

Soon they had their revenge. Ugly stories were 
whispered about. Oporinus, the printer, who had 
lived with him for two years, and who left him, it is 
said, because he thought Paracelsus concealed from 
him unfairly the secret of making laudanum, told how 
Paracelsus was neither more nor less than a sot, who 
came drunk to his lectures, used to prime himself with 
wine before going to his patients, and sat all night in 
pothouses swilling with the boors. 

Men looked coldly on him — longed to be rid of 
him. And they soon found an opportunity. He took 
in hand some Canon of the city from whom it was 
settled beforehand that he was to receive a hundred 
florins. The priest found himself cured so suddenly and 
easily that, by a strange logic, he refused to pay the 
money, and went to the magistrates. They supported 
him, and compelled Paracelsus to take sixflorins instead 
of the hundred. He spoke his mind fiercely to them. 
I believe, according to one story, he drew his long 
sword on the Canon. His best friends told him he must 
leave the place; and within two years, seemingly, 
after his first triumph at Basle, he fled from it a 
wanderer and a beggar. 

The rest of his life is a blank. He is said to 
have recommenced his old wanderings about Europe, 
studying the diseases of every country, and writing his 
books, which were none of them published till after 
his death. His enemies joyfully trampled on the 
fallen man. He was a "dull rustic, a monster, an 
atheist, a quack, a maker of gold, a magician." When 
he was drunk, one Wetter, his servant, told Erastus 

2 b 2 



372 PARACELSUS. 

(one of his enemies) that he used to offer to call up 
legions of devils to prove his skill, while Wetter, in 
abject terror of his spells, entreated him to leave the 
fiends alone — that he had sent his book by a fiend to the 
spirit of Galen in hell, and challenged him to say which 
was the better system, his or Paracelsus', and what not ? 

His books were forbidden to be printed. He him- 
self was refused a hearing, and it was not till after ten 
years of wandering that he found rest and protection 
in a little village of Carinthia. 

Three years afterwards he died in the hospital of 
St. Sebastian at Salzburg, in the Tyrol. His death was 
the signal for empirics and visionaries to foist on the 
public book after book on occult philosophy, written in 
his name — of which you may see ten folios — not more 
than a quarter, I believe, genuine. And these foolish 
books, as much as anything, have helped to keep up 
the popular prejudice against one who, in spite of all 
his faults was a true pioneer of science.* I believe 
(with those moderns who have tried to do him justice) 
that under all his verbiage and confusion there was a 
vein of sound scientific, experimental common sense. 

When he talks of astronomy as necessary to be 
known by a physician, it seems to me that he laughs 
at astrology, properly so called ; that is, that the stars 
influence the character and destiny of man. Mars, he 
says, did not make Nero cruel. There would have 

* For a true estimate of Paracelsus you must read " Fur Philippus 
Aureolus Theophrastus von Hohenheim," by that great German phy- 
sician and savant, Professor Marx, of Gottingen; also a valuable 
article founded on Dr. Marx's views in the " Nouveau Biographie 
Universelle ; " and also — which is within the reach of all — Professor 
Maurice's article on Paracelsus in Vol. II. of his history of " Moral 
and Metaphysical Philosophy." But the best key to Paracelsus is to 
be found in his own works. 



PABACELSUS. 373 

been long-lived men in the world if Saturn had never 
ascended the skies; and Helen would have been a 
wanton, though Venus had never been created. But 
he does believe that the heavenly bodies, and the whole 
skies, have a physical influence on climate, and on the 
health of men. 

He talks of alchemy, but he means by it, I think, 
only that sound science which we call chemistry, and 
at which he worked, wandering, he says, among mines 
and forges, as a practical metallurgist. 

He tells us — what sounds startling enough — that 
magic is the only preceptor which can teach the art 
of healing ; but he means, it seems to me, only an 
understanding of the invisible processes of nature, in 
which sense an electrician or a biologist, a Faraday or 
a Darwin, would be a magician ; and when he compares 
medical magic to the Cabalistic science, of which I 
spoke just now (and in which he seems to have 
believed), he only means, I think, that as the Cabala 
discovers hidden meaning and virtues in the text of 
Scripture, so ought the man of science to find them in 
the book of nature. But this kind of talk, wrapt up 
too in the most confused style, or rather no style at all, 
is quite enough to account for ignorant and envious 
people accusing him of magic, saying that he had 
discovered the philosopher's stone, and the secret of 
Hermes Trismegistus ; that he must make gold, because, 
though he squandered all his money, he had always 
money in hand ; and that he kept a " devil' s-bird," a 
familiar spirit, in the pommel of that famous long 
sword of his, which he was only too ready to lug out 
on provocation — the said spirit, Agoth by name, 
being probably only the laudanum bottle with which 
he worked so many wondrous cures, and of which, 



374 PAEACELSUS. 

to judge from his writings, he took only too freely 
himself. 

But the charm of Paracelsus is in his humour, 
his mother-wit. He was blamed for consorting with 
boors in pot-houses ; blamed for writing in racy 
German, instead of bad school-Latin : but you can 
hardly read a chapter, either of his German or his dog- 
Latin, without finding many a good thing — witty and 
weighty, though often not a little coarse. He talks 
in parables. He draws illustrations, like Socrates of 
old, from the commonest and the oddest matters to 
enforce the weightiest truths. " Fortune and misfor- 
tune," he says, for instance nobly enough, " are not like 
snow and wind, they must be deduced and known from 
the secrets of nature. Therefore misfortune is igno- 
rance, fortune is knowledge. The man who walks out 
in the rain is not unfortunate if he gets a ducking. 

" Nature," he says again, i( makes the text, and the 
medical man adds the gloss ; but the two fit each other 
no better than a dog does a bath ; and again, when he 
is arguing against the doctors who hated chemistry — 
" Who hates a thing which has hurt nobody ? Will 
you complain of a dog for biting you, if you lay 
hold of his tail ? Does the emperor send the thief to 
the gallows, or the thing which he has stolen ? The 
thief, I think. Therefore science should not be 
despised on account of some who know nothing about 
it." You will say the reasoning is not very clear, and 
indeed the passage, like too many more, smacks 
strongly of wine and laudanum. But such is his quaint 
racy style. As humorous a man, it seems to me, as 
you shall meet with for many a day ; and where there 
is humour there is pretty sure to be imagination, 
tenderness, and depth of heart. 



PARACELSUS. 375 

As for his notions of what a man of science should 
be, the servant of God, and of Nature — which is the 
work of God — using his powers not for money, not 
for ambition, but in love and charity, as he says, for 
the good of his fellow-man — on that matter Paracelsus 
is always noble. All that Mr. Browning has conceived 
on that point, all the noble speeches which he has put 
into Paracelsus' s mouth, are true to his writings. How 
can they be otherwise, if Mr. Browning set them forth 
— a genius as accurate and penetrating as he is wise 
and pure ? 

But was Paracelsus a drunkard after all ? 

Gentlemen, what concern is that of yours or mine ? 
I have gone into the question, as Mr. Browning did, 
cannot say, and don't care to say. 

Oporinus, who slandered him so cruelly, recanted 
when Paracelsus was dead, and sang his praises — too 
late. But I do not read that he recanted the charge of 
drunkenness. His defenders allow it, only saying 
that it was the fault not of him alone, but of all 
Germans. But if so, why was he specially blamed 
for what certainly others did likewise ? I cannot 
but fear from his writings, as well as from common 
report, that there was something wrong with the 
man. I say only something. Against his purity 
there never was a breath of suspicion. He was said 
to care nothing for women; and even that was 
made the subject of brutal jests and lies. But it may 
have been that, worn out with toil and poverty, he 
found comfort in that laudanum which he believed to 
be the arcanum — the very elixir of life ; that he got 
more and more into the habit of exciting his imagina- 
tion with the narcotic, and then, it may be, when the 
fit of depression followed, he strung his nerves up 



376 PAEACELSUS. 

again by wine. It may have been so. We have had, 
in the last generation, an exactly similar case in a 
philosopher, now I trust in heaven, and to whose 
genius I owe too much to mention his name here. 

But that Paracelsus was a sot I cannot believe. 
That face of his, as painted by the great Tintoretto, is 
not the face of a drunkard, quack, bully, but of such 
a man as Browning has conceived. The great globular 
brain, the sharp delicate chin, is not that of a sot. Nor 
are those eyes, which gleam out from under the deep 
compressed brow, wild, intense, hungry, homeless, 
defiant, and yet complaining, the eyes of a sot — but 
rather the eyes of a man who struggles to tell a great 
secret, and cannot find words for it, and yet wonders 
why men cannot understand, will not believe what 
seems to him as clear as day — a tragical face, as you 
well can see. 

God keep us all from making our lives a tragedy 
by one great sin. And now let us end this sad story 
with the last words which Mr. Browning puts into the 
mouth of Paracelsus, dying in the hospital at Salzburg, 
which have come literally true : 

Meanwhile, I have done well though not all well. 
As yet men cannot do without contempt ; 
""Pis for their good ; and therefore fit awhile 
That they reject the weak and scorn the false, 
Eather than praise the strong and true in nie : 
But after, they will know me. If I stoop 
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud, 
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp 
Close to my breast ; its splendour, soon or late, 
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day. 



GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 



The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more 
important personage than now. The supply of learned 
men was yery small, the demand for them very great. 
During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of 
the sixteenth century, the human mind turned more 
and more from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle 
Ages to that of the Romans and the Greeks ; and found 
more and more in old Pagan Art an element which 
Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for 
the full satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. 
At such a crisis of thought and taste, it was natural 
that the classical scholar, the man who knew old Rome, 
and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of 
the monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars 
should form, for awhile, a new and powerful aristocracy, 
limited and privileged, and all the more redoubtable, 
because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by 
intellect alone. 

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the 
monk and priest, at least feared the "scholar/' who held, 
so the vulgar believed, the keys of that magic lore by 
which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome, 



380 GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, 
which the degenerate modern conld never equal. 

If the " scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess 
probably begged of him a charm against toothache or 
rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursed with 
him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his for- 
tune by the art of transmuting metals into gold. The 
queen or bishop worried him in private about casting 
their nativities, and finding their fates among the stars. 
But the statesman, who dealt with more practical 
matters, hired him as an advocate and rhetorician, who 
could fight his master's enemies with the weapons of 
Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps 
were turned, he might be master of others, as long as 
he was master of himself. The complaints which he 
so often uttered concerning the cruelty of fortune, the 
fickleness of princes and so forth, were probably no 
more just then than such complaints are now. Then, 
as now, he got his deserts ; and the world bought him 
at his own price. If he chose to sell himself to this 
patron and to that, he was used and thrown away : if 
he chose to remain in honourable independence, he was 
courted and feared. 

Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth 
century, none surely is more notable than George 
Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son, by force of 
native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, 
fights his way upward, through poverty and severest 
persecution, to become the correspondent and friend of 
the greatest literary celebrities of the Continent, com- 
parable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of 
antiquity; the preceptor of princes ; the counsellor and 
spokesman of Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous 
of times; and leaves behind him political treatises, 



GEOKGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 3S1 

which have influenced not only the history of his own 
country, but that of the civilised world. 

Such a success could not be attained without making 
enemies, perhaps without making mistakes. But the 
more we study George Buchanan's history, the less we 
shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more 
inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, 
affectionate man, with a strong love of right and scorn 
of wrong, and a humour withal which saved him — 
except on really great occasions — from bitterness, and 
helped him to laugh where narrower natures would 
have only snarled, — he is, in many respects, a type of 
those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his jokes, 
genuine or reputed, as a common household book.* 
A schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long 
years amid the temptations which, in those days, 
degraded his class into cruel and sordid pedants, he rose 
from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense of the 
word, a courtier : " One/' says Daniel Heinsius, " who 
seemed not only born for a court, but born to amend 
it. He brought to his queen that at which she could 
not wonder enough. For, by affecting a certain liberty 
in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under 
the cloak of simplicity/'' Of him and his compeers, 
Turnebus, and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, 
Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had 
nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown 
and cap. "Austere in face, and rustic in his looks," 
says David Buchanan, " but most polished in style and 
speech ; and continually, even in serious conversation, 

* So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried in 
vain to get a sight of this book. I need not tell Scotch scholars how 
much I am indebted throughout this article to Mr. David Irving's 
erudite second edition of Buchanan's Life. 



382 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

jesting most wittily." " .Rough-hewn, slovenly, and 
rude," says Peacham, in his " Compleat Gentleman/' 
speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in old age, 
" in his person, behaviour, and fashion ; seldom caring 
for a better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about 
him : yet his inside and conceipt in poesie was most 
rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in verse most 
excellent." A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just 
now, he seems to have absorbed all the best culture 
which France could afford him, without losing the 
strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited 
from his Stirlingshire kindred. 

The story of his life is easily traced. When an old 
man, he himself wrote down the main events of it, at 
the request of his friends ; and his sketch has been 
filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at 
least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn 
— where an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has 
been erected in this century — of a family " rather 
ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of 
manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his 
seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a 
widowed mother, Agnes Heriot — of whom one wishes 
to know more ; for the rule that great sons have great 
mothers probably holds good in her case. George gave 
signs, while at the village school, of future scholarship ; 
and when he was only fourteen, his uncle James sent 
him to the University of Paris. Those were hard 
times ; and the youths, or rather boys, who meant to 
become scholars, had a cruel life of it, cast desperately 
out on the wide world to beg and starve, either into 
self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and 
soul. And a cruel life George had. Within two years 
he was down in a severe illness, his uncle dead, his 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 883 

supplies stopped ; and the boy of sixteen got home, he 
does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering ; and was 
with Albany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual 
attack on Wark Castle. Marching back through deep 
snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him in bed 
all winter. Then he and his brother were sent to 
St. Andrew's, where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The 
next summer he went to France once more; and 
' ' fell/' he says, " into the flames of the Lutheran sect, 
which was then spreading far and wide." Two years 
of penury followed ; and then three years of school- 
mastering in the College of St. Barbe, which he has 
immortalised — at least, for the few who care to read 
modern Latin poetry — in his elegy on " The Miseries 
of a Parisian Teacher of the Humanities."" The 
wretched regent-master, pale and suffering, sits up 
all night preparing his lecture, biting his nails and 
thumping his desk ; and falls asleep for a few minutes, 
to start up at the sound of the four-o'clock bell, and be 
in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his rod 
in the other, trying to do work on his own account at 
old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his 
wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to 
answer to truants' names. The class is all wrong. 
tc One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another 
cries, another writes home. Then comes the rod,' the 
sound of blows, and howls; and the day passes in 
tears." " Then mass, then another lesson, then more 
blows ; there is hardly time to eat." I have no space 
to finish the picture of the stupid misery which, 
Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while it 
starved his body. However, happier days came. 
Gilbert Kennedy, Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have 
been a noble young gentleman, took him as his tutor 



384 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

for the next five years ; and with him he went back 
to Scotland. 

But there his plain speaking got him, as it did 
more than once afterward, into trouble. He took it 
into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar, a Latin 
poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to 
become a Gray Friar, and Buchanan answered in 
language which had the unpleasant fault of being too 
clever, and — to judge from contemporary evidence — 
only too true. The friars said nothing at first; but 
when King James made Buchanan tutor to one of his 
natural sons, they, " men professing meekness, took 
the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men 
so pious in the opinion of the people/' So Buchanan 
himself puts it : but, to do the poor friars justice, 
they must have been angels, not men, if they did not 
writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid 
on them. To be told that there was hardly a place in 
heaven for monks, was hard to hear and bear. They 
accused him to the king of heresy; but not being 
then in favour with James, they got no answer, and 
Buchanan was commanded to repeat the castigation. 
Having found out that the friars were not to be 
touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and 
ambiguous poem. But the king, who loved a joke, 
demanded something sharp and stinging, and Buchanan 
obeyed by writing, but not publishing, " The Francis- 
cans," a long satire, compared to which the "Somnium" 
was bland and merciful. The storm rose. Cardinal 
Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the 
king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had 
just burnt five poor souls ; so, knowing James's 
avarice, he fled to England, through freebooters and 
pestilence. 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 385 

There lie found, lie says, " men of both factions 
being burned on the same day and in the same fire " 
— a pardonable exaggeration — " by Henry VIIL, in 
his old age more intent on his own safety than on the 
purity of religion. So to his beloved France he went 
again, to find his enemy Beaton ambassador at Paris. 
The capital was too hot to hold him ; and he fled south 
to Bordeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese prin- 
cipal of the College of Guienne. As Professor of Latin 
at Bordeaux, we find him presenting a Latin poem 
to Charles Y. ; and indulging that fancy of his for 
Latin poetry which seems to us nowadays a childish 
pedantry, which was then — when Latin was the ver- 
nacular tongue of all scholars — a serious, if not 
altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so 
famous in their day — the "Baptist," the "Medea/' 
the " Jephtha," and the "Alcestis" — there is neither 
space nor need to speak here, save to notice the bold 
declamations in the "Baptist" against tyranny and 
priestcraft; and to notice also that these tragedies 
gained for the poor Scotsman, in the eyes of the best 
scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to vene- 
ration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation 
at once ; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, 
" three of the most learned men in the world taught 
humanity in the same college," viz. Turnebus, Muretus, 
and Buchanan. 

Then followed a strange episode in his life. A 
university had been founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, 
and Andrea Grovea had been invited to bring thither 
what French savants he could collect. Buchanan went 
to Portugal with his brother Patrick, two more Scots- 
men, Dempster and Pamsay, and a goodly company of 
French scholars, whose names and histories may be 
vol. i. — h. e. 2 c 



386 GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAE. 

read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise. 
All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a 
year or so. Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, 
by a peripeteia too common in those days and countries, 
Buchanan and two of his friends migrated unwillingly 
from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and 
found themselves in the Inquisition. 

Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine 
was more of a Lutheran than a Catholic on the question 
of the mass. He and his friends had eaten flesh in 
Lent ; which, he says., almost everyone in Spain did. 
But he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic ; 
the Gray Friars formed but one brotherhood through- 
out Europe ; and news among them travelled surely if 
not fast, so that the story of the satire written in 
Scotland had reached Portugal. The culprits were 
imprisoned, examined, bullied — but not tortured — for 
a year and a half. At the end of that time, the proofs 
of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest, says 
Buchanan with honest pride, "they should get the 
reputation of having vainly tormented a man not alto- 
gether unknown/' they sent him for some months to a 
monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The 
men/' he says, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but 
utterly ignorant of religion ; " and Buchanan solaced 
himself during the intervals of their instructions, by 
beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms. 

At last he got free, and begged leave to return 
to France ; but in vain. And so, wearied out, he 
got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and 
escaped to England. But England, he says, during 
the anarchy of Edward VI/s reign, was not a land 
which suited him ; and he returned to France, to f ulnl 
the hopes which he had expressed in his charming 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 387 

" Desiderium Lutitise," and the still more charming, 
because more simple, "Adventus in Galliam," in which 
he bids farewell, in most melodious verse, to "the 
hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods 
fertile in naught but penury." 

Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering 
and verse - writing : the Latin paraphrase of the 
Psalms ; another of the e ' Alcestis " of Euripides ; 
an Bpithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, 
noble and sincere, however fantastic and pedantic, 
after the manner of the times ; " Pomps/'' too, for her 
wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all 
the heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, 
panegyrics, satires, much of which latter productions 
he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his old 
age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to 
republish the follies and coarsenesses of his youth. 
He was now one of the most famous scholars in Europe, 
and the intimate friend of all the great literary men. 
Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more ? Was 
he to sink into the mere pedant ; or, if he could not 
do that, into the mere court versifier ? 

The wars of religion saved him, as they saved 
many another noble soul, from that degradation. The 
events of 1560-62 forced Buchanan, as they forced 
many a learned man besides, to choose whether he 
wo aid be a child of light or a child of darkness; 
whether he would be a dilettante classicist, or a 
preacher — it might be a martyr — of the Gospel. 
Buchanan may have left France in ( ' The Troubles " 
merely to enjoy in his own country elegant and 
learned repose. He may have fancied that he had 
found it, when he saw himself, in spite of his public 
profession of adherence to the Reformed Kirk, reading 

2 c 2 



388 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

Livy every afternoon with his exquisite young sove- 
reign ; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of 
Crossraguel Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, 
Principal of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrew's. 
Perhaps he fancied at times that " to-morrow was to 
be as to-day, and much more abundant;''' that thence- 
forth he might read his folio, and write his epigram, 
and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable pluralist, 
taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor 
Wishart had been burned, above the blue sea and the 
yellow sands, and looking up to the castle tower from 
whence his enemy Beaton's corpse had been hung 
out ; with the comfortable reflection that quieter 
times had come, and that whatever evil deeds Arch- 
bishop Hamilton might dare, he would not dare to 
put the Principal of St. Leonard's into the <c bottle 
dungeon." 

If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, 
they were disappointed suddenly and fearfully. The 
fire which had been kindled in France was to reach 
to Scotland likewise. " Revolutions are not made 
with rose-water;" and the time was at hand when all 
good spirits in Scotland, and George Buchanan among 
them, had to choose, once and for all, amid danger, 
confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or 
Mammon ; for to serve both would be soon impossible. 

Which side, in that war of light and darkness, 
George Buchanan took, is notorious. He saw then, as 
others have seen since, that the two men in Scotland 
who were capable of being her captains in the strife 
were Knox and Murray ; and to them he gave in his 
allegiance heart and soul. 

This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By 
his conduct to Queen Mary he must stand or fall. 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 389 

It is my belief that lie will stand. It is not 
my intention to enter into the details of a matter 
so painful, so shocking, so prodigious ; and now that 
that question is finally set at rest, by the writings both 
of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no need to 
allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is 
concerned. One may now have every sympathy with 
Mary Stuart ; one may regard with awe a figure so 
stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic, — for she 
reminds one rather of the heroine of an old Greek 
tragedy, swept to her doom by some irresistible fate, 
than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and of our 
modern and Christian times. One may sympathise 
with the great womanhood which charmed so many 
while she was alive ; which has charmed, in later years, 
so many noble spirits who have believed in her inno- 
cence, and have doubtless been elevated and purified 
by their devotion to one who seemed to them an ideal 
being. So far from regarding her as a hateful per- 
sonage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a 
woman whom God may have loved, and may have 
pardoned, to judge from the punishment so swift, and 
yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must 
so believe who holds that punishment is a sign of 
mercy ; that the most dreadful of all dooms is im- 
punity. Nay, more, those " Casket " letters and 
sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who 
believes in her guilt on other grounds ; a relief when 
one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness, a delicacy, 
a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously mis- 
placed, which shows what a womanly heart was there ; 
a heart which, joined to that queenly brain, might 
have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland, had 
not the whole character been warped and ruinate from 



390 GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

childhood, by an education so abominable, that anyone 
who knows what words she must have heard, what 
scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth 
up, will wonder that she sinned so little : not that she 
sinned so much. One may feel, in a word, that there 
is every excuse for those who have asserted Mary's 
innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank 
from believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his 
own place and time, may have felt as deeply that he 
could do no otherwise than he did. 

The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch 
literature know well, may be reduced to two heads. 
1st. The letters and sonnets were forgeries. Maitland 
of Lethington may have forged the letters ; Buchanan, 
according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, 
Buchanan made use of them in his Detection, knowing 
them to be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary was innocent 
or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungratef ul part in 
putting himself in the forefront amongst her accusers. 
He had been her tutor, her pensioner. She had heaped 
him with favours ; and, after all, she was his queen, 
and a defenceless woman : and yet he returned her 
kindness, in the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only 
for a rancorous and reckless advocate, determined to 
force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory. 

Now as to the Casket letters. I should have 
thought they bore in themselves the best evidence of 
being genuine. I can add nothing to the arguments 
of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this : that no one 
clever enough to be a forger would have put together 
documents so incoherent, and so incomplete. For the 
evidence of guilt which they contain is, after all, slight 
and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether; 
seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 391 

the supposed discovery of the letters, to every person 
at home and abroad who had any knowledge of the 
facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters 
with proven facts : the answer is, that whosoever wrote 
the letters would be more likely to know facts which 
were taking place around them than any critic could 
be oue hundred or three hundred years afterwards. 
But if these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, 
they are only a fresh argument for their authenticity. 
Mary, writing in agony and confusion, might easily 
make a mistake : forgers would only take too good 
care to make none. 

But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters 
and sonnets, in spite of the arguments of good Dr« 
Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is to be 
found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days 
would have made Mary write in some Semiramis or 
Koxana vein, utterly alien to the tenderness, the 
delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious 
weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which 
makes the letters, to those who — as I do — believe in 
them, more pathetic than any fictitious sorrows which 
poets could invent. More than one touch, indeed, of 
utter self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unex- 
pected, so subtle, and yet so true to the heart of woman, 
that — as has been well said — if it was invented there 
must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare ; 
who yet has died without leaving any other sign, for 
good or evil, of his dramatic genius. 

As for the theory (totally unsupported) that 
Buchanan forged the poem usually called the 
" Sonnets ; " it is paying old Geordie's genius, how- 
ever versatile it may have bee^ too high a compli- 
ment to believe that he could have written both them 



392 GEORGE BUCHANAN", SCHOLAR. 

and the Detection ; while it is paying his shrewdness 
too low a compliment to believe that he could have 
put into them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, 
the well-known line, which seems incompatible with 
the theory both of the letters and of his own Detec- 
tion ; and which has ere now been brought forward as 
a fresh proof of Mary's innocence. 

And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets : 
their delicacy, their grace, their reticence, are so many 
arguments against their having been forged by any 
Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one 
in whose character — whatever his other virtues may 
have been — delicacy was by no means the strongest 
point. 

As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful 
to Mary, it must be said : That even if she, and not 
Murray, had bestowed on him the temporalities of 
Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely 
fair pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not 
aware that payment, or even favours, however 
gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in 
questions of highest morality and highest public 
importance. And the importance of that question 
cannot be exaggerated. At a moment when Scot- 
land seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, 
civil and religious, and was in danger of be- 
coming a prey either to England or to France, if 
there could not be formed out of the heart of her a 
people, steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically 
because strong in the fear of God and the desire of 
righteousness — at such a moment as this, a crime had 
been committed, the like of which had not been heard 
in Europe since the tragedy of Joan of Naples. All 
Europe stood aghast. The honour of the Scottish 



GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 393 

nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell 
were known to be implicated in the deed ; and — as 
Buchanan puts it in the opening of his " De Jure 
Regni " — " The fault of some few was charged upon 
all ; and the common hatred of a particular person did 
redound to the whole nation ; so that even such as 
were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the 
infamy of men's crimes.'"* 

To vindicate the national honour, and to punish 
the guilty, as well as to save themselves from utter 
anarchy, the great majority of the Scotch nation had 
taken measures against Mary which required explicit 
justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan 
frankly confesses in the opening of his <c De Jure 
Regm." The chief authors of those measures had 
been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to 
answer for their conduct to the Queen of England. 
Queen Elizabeth — a fact which was notorious enough 
then, though it has been forgotten till the last few years 
— was doing her utmost to shield Mary. Buchanan 
was deputed, it seems, to speak out for the people of 
Scotland; and certainly never people had an abler 
apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must be 
remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage 
matter; if he used — and it may be abused — all the 
arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he was 
fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national 
life, of his country, and striking — as men in such cases 
have a right to strike — as hard as he could. If he 
makes no secret of his indignation, and even contempt, 
it must be remembered that indignation and contempt 
may well have been real with him, while they were 

* From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of 
Honour of the Kingdom of Scotland." 



394 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

real with the soundest part of his countrymen ; with 
that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted 
by French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by 
feudal subservience, which has been the leaven which 
has leavened the whole Scottish people in the last 
three centuries with the elements of their greatness. 
If, finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen 
charges which Mr. Burton thinks incredible, it must 
be remembered that, as he well says, these charges 
give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it 
must be remembered also, that that popular feeling 
need not have been altogether unfounded. Stories 
which are incredible, thank God, in these milder days, 
were credible enough then, because, alas ! they were 
so often true. Things more ugly than any related of 
poor Mary were possible enough — as no one knew 
better than Buchanan — in that very French court in 
which Mary had been brought up ; things as ugly 
were possible in Scotland then, and for at least a 
century later ; and while we may hope that Buchanan 
has overstated his case, we must not blame him too 
severely for yielding to a temptation common to all 
men of genius when their creative power is roused to 
its highest energy by a great cause and a great 
indignation. 

And that the genius was there, no man can doubt ; 
one cannot read that "hideously eloquent " descrip- 
tion of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has well 
chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without 
seeing that we are face to face with a genius of a very 
lofty order : not, indeed, of the loftiest — for there is 
always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want of 
unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness — but still a 
genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers 



GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 395 

from whom lie took Ms manner. Whether or not 
we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he 
equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him 
fairly as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, 
Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful 
subject ; only quoting — if I may be permitted to quote 
— Mr. Burton's wise and gentle verdict on the whole. 
" Buchanan/' he says, " though a zealous Protestant, 
had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of 
Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was 
great and beautiful. Like the rest of his countrymen, 
he bowed himself in presence of the lustre that sur- 
rounded the early career of his mistress. More than 
once he expressed his pride and reverence in the in- 
spiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to 
be worthy of the theme. There is not, perhaps, to be 
found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of 
shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy 
end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the volume 
which contains the beautiful epigram ' c Nympha Cale- 
donia " in one part, the " Detectio Marise Reginse " 
in another ; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful 
parallel of the reaction in the popular mind. This 
reaction seems to have been general, and not limited 
to the Protestant party; for the conditions under 
which it became almost a part of the creed of the 
Church of Rome to believe in her innocence had not 
arisen.'" 

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have 
thought, raised himself by subserviency to the in- 
trigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in 
Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. 
The murder of Murray did not involve Buchanan's 
fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could do it, 



396 GEOKGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

by that " Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis," 
in which he showed himself as great a master of 
Scottish, as he was of Latin prose. His satire of the 
" Chameleon/' though its publication was stopped by 
Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by 
many of those same "True Lords;" and though 
there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any 
Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed 
an honest indignation against that wily turncoat's 
misgoings, which could not but recommend the author 
to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, 
and not because he was a rogue, and a hired literary 
spadassin, that to the best heads in Scotland he 
seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he 
be provided with continually increasing employment. 
As tutor to James I. ; as director, for a short time, of 
the chancery ; as keeper of the privy seal, and privy 
councillor ; as one of the commissioners for codifying 
the laws, and again — for in the semi-anarchic state of 
Scotland, government had to do everything in the way 
of organisation — in the committee for promulgating a 
standard Latin grammar; in the committee for re- 
forming the University of St. Andrew's: in all these 
Buchanan's talents were again and again called for ; 
and always ready. The value of his work, especially 
that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged 
by Scotsmen, rather than by an Englishman ; but all 
that one knows of it justifies Melville's sentence in 
the well-known passage in his memoirs, wherein he 
describes the tutors and household of the young king. 
' ' Mr. George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not 
far before him ; " in plain words, a high-minded and 
right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which lay 
nearest him. The worst that can be said against him 



GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 397 

during these times is, that his name appears with the 
sum of £100 against it, as one of those " who were to be 
entertained in Scotland by pensions out of England; " 
and B-uddinian, of course, comments on the fact by 
saying that Buchanan " was at length to act under 
the threefold character of malcontent, reformer, and 
pensioner : " but it gives no proof whatsoever that 
Buchanan ever received any such bribe ; and in the 
very month, seemingly, in which that list was written 
— 10th March, 1579 — Buchanan had given a proof to 
the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, 
by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen 
Elizabeth as it was to his own royal pupil ; namely, his 
famous " De Jure Eegni apud Scotos," the very primer, 
according to many great thinkers, of constitutional 
liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, " not 
only as his monitor, but also as an importunate and bold 
exactor, which in these his tender and flexible years 
may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery.'" 
He has complimented James already on his abhorrence 
of flattery, "his inclination far above his years for 
undertaking all heroical and noble attempts, his promp- 
titude in obeying his instructors and governors, and 
all who give him sound admonition, and his judgment 
and diligence in examining affairs, so that no man's 
authority can have much weight with him unless it be 
confirmed by probable reasons.'''' Buchanan may have 
thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated 
some of James's ill conditions ; the petulance which 
made him kill the Master of Mar's sparrow, in trying 
to wrest it out of his hand ; the carelessness with which 
— if the story told by Chy tragus, on the authority of 
Buchanan's nephew, be true — James signed away his 
crown to Buchanan for fifteen days, and only discovered 



393 GEOKGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAK. 

his mistake by seeing Buchanan act in open court 
the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last 
made him a scholar ; he may have fancied that he had 
made him likewise a manful man : yet he may have 
dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations 
would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that 
flattery might be, as it was after all, the cause of 
James's moral ruin. He at least will be no flatterer. 
He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, 
with a calm but distinct assertion of his mother's 
guilt, and a justification of the conduct of men who 
were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for 
they were laid in their graves ; and then goes on to 
argue fairly, but to lay down firmly, in a sort of 
Socratic dialogue, those very principles by loyalty to 
which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will 
reign, over these realms. So with his History of 
Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed 
the value of the earlier portions of it : but they have 
surely increased the value of those later portions, in 
which Buchanan inserted so much which he had 
already spoken out in his Detection of Mary. In that 
book also liberavit animam suam ; he spoke his mind 
fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who 
he must have known — for Buchanan was no dullard — 
regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few 
years be able to work his ruin. 

But those few years were not given to Buchanan. 
He had all but done his work, and he hastened to get 
it over before the night should come wherein no man can 
work. One must be excused for telling — one would 
not tell it in a book intended to be read only by 
Scotsmen, who know or ought to know the tale already 
- — how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew 



GEOEGB BUCHANAN, SCHOLAE. 399 

Tliomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 
1581, hearing that he was ill, and his History still in 
the press ; and how they found the old sage, true to 
his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook 
to his servant-lad ; and how he told them that doing 
that was ' ' better than stealing sheep, or sitting idle, 
which was as bad," and showed them that dedication 
to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as 
a hero whose equal was hardly to be found in history, 
that very King David whose liberality to the Romish 
Church provoked James's witticism that " David was a 
sair saint for the crown." Andrew Melville, so James 
Melville says, found fault with the style. Buchanan 
replied that he could do no more for thinking of 
another thing, which was to die. They then went to 
Arbuthnot's printing-house, and inspected the history, 
as far as that terrible passage concerning Rizzio's 
burial, where Mary is represented as "laying the 
miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Yalois, the 
late queen." Alarmed, and not without reason, at 
such plain speaking, they stopped the press, and went 
back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was in bed. 
"He was going," he said, "the way of welfare." 
They asked him to soften the passage; the king 
might prohibit the whole work. " Tell me, man," said 
Buchanan, " if I have told the truth." They could 
not, or would not, deny it. " Then I will abide his 
feud, and all his kin's ; pray, pray to God for me, and 
let Him direct all." " So," says Melville, " before the 
printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, 
wise, and godly man ended his mortal life." 

Camden has a hearsay story — written, it must bo 
remembered, in James I.'s time — that Buchanan, on 
his death-bed, repented of his harsh words against 



400 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

Queen Mary ; and an old Lady Kosyth is said to have 
said that when she was young a certain David Buchanan 
recollected hearing some such words from George 
Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read 
what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on 
both sides of the question : whatever conclusion they 
come to, it will probably not be that to which George 
Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman : that "Bu- 
chanan, like other liars, who, by the repetition of false- 
hoods are induced to consider the fiction as truth, had 
so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of 
his Detections, and the figments of his History, that 
he at length regarded his fictions and his forgeries as 
most authentic facts."" 

At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not 
paid him in that coin which base men generally con- 
sider the only coin worth having, namely, the good 
things of this life. He left nothing behind him — if at 
least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the " Testament 
Dative " which he gives in his appendix — save arrears 
to the sum of £100 of his Crossraguel pension. We 
may believe as we choose the story in Mackenzie's 
" Scotch Writers/' that when he felt himself dying, 
he asked his servant Young about the state of his 
funds, and finding he had not enough to bury himself 
withal, ordered what he had to be given to the poor, 
and said that if they did not choose to bury him they 
might let him lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, 
the matter was very little to him. He was buried, it 
seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the 
Greyfriars' Churchyard — one says in a plain turf 
grave — among the marble monuments which covered 
the bones of worse or meaner men ; and whether or 
not the " Throughstone " which, " sunk under the 



GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 401 

ground in the Greyfriars/' was raised and cleaned by 
the Council of Edinburgh in 1701, was really George 
Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselves 
little for several generations where he lay. 

For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his 
age. Not only Catholic Scotsmen, like Blackwood, 
Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir Thomas 
Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the 
" De Jure Regni." They may have had some reason 
on their side. In the then anarchic state of Scotland, 
organisation and unity under a common head may 
have been more important than the assertion of popular 
rights. Be that as it may, in 1584, only two years 
after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned his 
Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all 
possessors of copies to deliver them up, that they 
might be purged of "the offensive and extraordinary 
matters " which they contained. The ' ' De Jure 
Regni" was again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, 
even in manuscript; and in 1683, the whole of 
Buchanan's political works had the honour of being 
burned by the University of Oxford, in company with 
those of Milton, Languet, and others, as " pernicious 
books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the 
sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, 
and of all human society." And thus the seed which 
Buchanan had sown, and Milton had watered — for the 
allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is 
probably true, and equally honourable to both — lay 
trampled into the earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it 
tillered out, and blossomed, and bore fruit to a good 
purpose, in the Revolution of 1688. 

To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland 
owes, as England owes likewise, much of her modern 
vol. i. — h. e. 2d 



402 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

liberty. But Scotland's debt to him, it* seems to me, 
is even greater on the count of morality, public and 
private. What the morality of the Scotch upper 
classes was like, in Buchanan's early days, is too 
notorious; and there remains proof enough — in the 
writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay — that the 
morality of the populace, which looked up to the nobles 
as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. 
As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to in- 
crease likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger 
of falling into such a state as that into which Poland 
fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years 
after ; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its 
order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by 
a thin coating of French " civilisation/' and, as 
in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of 
Paris should be added to those of the Northern 
freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, 
it was needed that she should be united into 
one people, strong, not in mere political, but in 
moral ideas ; strong by the clear sense of right and 
wrong, by the belief in the government and the judg- 
ments of a living God. And the tone which Buchanan, 
like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of 
their day, helped notably that national salvation. 
It gathered together, organised, strengthened, the 
scattered and wavering elements of public morality. 
It assured the hearts of all men who loved the right 
and hated the wrong ; and taught a whole nation to 
call acts by their just names, whoever might be the 
doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience 
of men. It proclaimed a universal and God-given 
morality, a bar at which all, from the lowest to the 
highest, must alike be judged. 



GEOEGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 403 

Tlie tone was stern : but there was need of stern- 
ness. Moral life and death were in the balance. If 
the Scots people were to be. told that the crimes which 
roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond 
punishment,, or to be hushed up and slipped over in 
any way, there was an end of morality among them. 
Every man, from the greatest to the least, would go 
and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That 
method was being tried in France, and in Spain like- 
wise, during those very years. Notorious crimes were 
hushed up under pretence of loyalty; excused as 
political necessities ; smiled away as natural and 
pardonable weaknesses. The result was the utter 
demoralisation, both of France and Spain. Knox and 
Buchanan, the one from the standpoint of an old 
Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a 
Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and 
called acts by their just names, appealing alike to 
conscience and to God. The result was virtue and 
piety, and that manly independence of soul which is 
thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country 
labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided 
almost into two hostile camps, two rival races. 

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only 
in those who sided with Buchanan and his friends, but 
in those who most opposed them. The Roman Catholic 
preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impunity, 
while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, 
and set themselves to assert her entire innocence ; 
while the Scots who have followed their example have, 
to their honour, taken up the same ground. They 
have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on 
the ground of morality : they have alleged — as they 
had a fair right to do — the probability of intrigue and 



404 GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR. 

forgery in an age so profligate : the improbability that 
a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and con- 
fessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, 
should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so 
untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies 
have been enlisted — and who can blame them? — in 
loyalty to" a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the 
unfortunate and — as they conceived — the innocent;, 
but whether they have been right or wrong in their 
view of facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always 
- — as far as I know — been right in their view of morals ; 
they have never deigned to admit Mary's guilt, and 
then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather 
sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a 
certain school of French literature, too common, alas ! in 
a certain school of modern English novels. They have 
not said, cl She did it ; but after all, was the deed so 
very inexcusable ? 3i They have said, " The deed was 
inexcusable : but she did not do it.-" And so the Scotch 
admirers of Mary, who have numbered among them 
many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit^ 
have kept at least themselves unstained; and have 
shown, whether consciously or not, that they too share 
in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has been so 
much strengthened — as I believe — by the plain speech 
of good old George Buchanan. 



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